feminism + gender Flashcards
What is feminism?
- Analysis of global subordination of women + dedicated to its elimination
- Promoting equality and justice for all women
- Analysis of power and its effects (including subtle power women used when they couldn’t use power directly)
- Exposing the ways in which social political, economic and cultural relations constructed interpretations of women’s identities, experiences, status and worth
- feminist IR is based on an entire history of feminist ideas
criticism feminism
feminism struggles to free all people: exclusion/marginalizing lesbian/bisexual and transwomen (fear it would jeopardize the overal credibility)
women from the global South argued that feminism as appropriated and defined by the west has become a tool of cultural imperialism + feminism perjured, ignored, rejected or colonized indigenous forms of feminisms
UN decade for women
1976-1985
research into women’s experiences, status, contributions and concerns
exposed fundamental inequalities of women’s status and experience globally and domestically
first international movement/organization around women
1915 Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom
Feminist IR theory
deconstructive: critique of the state of the field : biased on men’s experiences, role and status
reconstructive: introducing new methods and theories for understanding international politics
e.g. feminist view of the state
concepts and practices of the state in its emergence exclude women from all participation:
- stem from a time were women had no full legal status
- women crucial for the foundations of the state, Hobbes: subordination of women through heterosexual marriage is a necessary step in the establishment of civil society and eventually the state
- state regulated that men were rulers and women to be ruled through a constant state of legal and social violence (e.g. men as soldiers, dissociates masculinity as property by birth, establishes masculinity/feminity to be constructed)
The regulation of social and political relations that ground the state (marriage and the subordination of women) and structure the state (military) are fundamentally relations of power which take women and gender as central to their operation.
liberal feminist IR
- gender as an empirical variable: biological sex difference
- gender explains social, political and economic inequalities
- power rests in social, political and economic hierarchies
Advocate for the rights and representation granted to men be extended to women (= changing institutions + laws)
gender inequality as a major barrier to human development that leads to greater incentives of war and violence (subordination of women is also violence)
critical feminist IR
- gender as social construct (social interpretation of biological differences)
- power rests in the practices, identities and institutions that interpret and fix these differences
- highlight broader social, economic and political relationship that structure relational power
Gender and class oppression are interdependent and intertwined: women’s oppression arises from both (Iris Young):
- Patriarchy: system of male domination (produces specific gender oppression of women)
- System of the mode of production and class relations (produces class oppression and work alienation of most women)
feminization and racialization of poverty:
different valuing of reproductive and productive work
double burden of household and waged labor
massive global shifts in the structure of work itself
postcolonial feminist IR
Links everyday life and local gendered contexts and ideologies to the large, transnational political and economic constructs and ideologies of capitalism, materializing colonialism within these larger patterns.
highlights the centrality of conceptions of gender and of women to colonial regimes and their continuing effects: e.g. rules governing sex resulted in difference between colonizer and colonized especially for women (who were raped)
highlight that not all women are colonized equally
recognize that feminism of the global north is rooted in western europe discourses/problems/matters and that this is not always culturally suitable for the global south
calls attention to environmental exploitation as another manifestation of the legacies of imperialism (climate change disproportionately affects women and girls (responsible for feeding their families))
poststructural feminist IR
- gender as an effect of discourses of power: gender as an analytical category
- gender is a social category imposed on a sexed body (sex is also constructed)
- gender isn’t what we are, but what we are expected to do (if you don’t do as your gender prescribes, you’re punished by society)
- gender as a ‘code’ for the operation of power, an analytical category that isn’t necessarily linked to male and female bodies
- emphasizes the role of language in creating gendered knowledge and experiences
Judith Butler
genderparity
gendergelijkheid
- lack of genderparity in international tribunals and such
postcolonial feminism + critical feminism have in common:
- Wary of gender essentialism (assumption of the sameness of all women’s experiences by virtue of being female)
- Emphasize the tight link between feminist theorizing and feminist actions
- Excoriation of the use of feminism (by Bush and his administration) to justify the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (to distinguish the US and those who it targeted + to use the ‘’emancipation’’ of women as evidence of the US victory (women were violated in different forms)).
Essentialism
belief that there are certain inherent and unchangeable characteristics associated with biological sex
gender
the social codes that express masculinity and femininity
Gender is organized through diverse, malleable, and contested social norms. Gender flows: it spreads through the international society.
patriarchy
the rule of men
*There are arguments that patriarchy is to static an idea to describe the diversity of gender relations + that it doesn’t sufficiently incorporate questions of intersectionality
