Feminist International Relations, View of Power

Providing a conceptualization of power is as central to feminist accounts of international relations (IR) as it is to the more traditional approaches within the discipline. However, the two accounts are very different. Through their focus on gender, feminist researchers have refocused understandings of power within the traditional IR concerns of interstate relations, balances of power, sovereignty, the operation of the market, diplomacy, and so on. In doing so, feminists have brought new areas of study to the IR field that fundamentally alter the very premises of the discipline.

Within this, there is no single account of power within feminist IR because this would run counter to one of the central objectives within feminism—to avoid stifling diversity within the approach by delineating rigid boundaries about what may be counted as “correct” forms of research.

When analyzing issues of power in IR, feminist scholars base their accounts on three main concepts. First, feminists maintain that the central tenets of IR, the issues it focuses on, its foundational myths and theories, and the methodologies that it employs are not neutral in gender as was often claimed but are shaped by an underlying masculinist basis. Second, this masculinist basis within IR functions to conceal the agency of women and their central role in the production and reproduction of international politics. Third, feminists maintain that although these gender roles and identities ascribed to women and to men are a central but mainly unexplored category within IR, they are fluid social constructions that are amenable to continuous change.

Therefore, it becomes apparent that rather than theorizing power as a tangible to be contested between states and other international actors and institutions, feminist IR scholars are concerned with producing more wide-ranging accounts that explore the gendered impacts and influences within the practices of power.

These differences between feminist and more mainstream or “malestream” approaches are based on the very different ontological and epistemological understandings that most feminists draw on. Feminist IR began to emerge as a specific subfield of the discipline in the 1980s. At this point, the previous consensus that had focused research around the search for universal scientific laws of the “international” based on a rigorous application of positivistic scientific methods, was becoming increasingly questioned as more interpretive and anti-foundational approaches including theories informed by poststructuralist thought, critical theory, and forms of constructivism began to rigorously critique the dominant theorizations of the field.

Early accounts such as Cynthia Enloe's canonical text Bananas, Beaches and Bases began to question the apparent naturalness within mainstream IR of its understandings of power and the main tenets of the discipline. Enloe's book is centered on the asking of the seemingly straightforward question, “Where are the women in IR?” She then proceeds to examine how the world of IR appears to be a world made by men, where women are scarce and their influence minimal. But this masculinized world of the military, foreign policy making, international trade, and so on is also one that is underpinned by the often invisible work of women in many guises—as domestic workers, diplomatic wives, factory workers in export processing zones, prostitutes, workers in international agri-business, and so on. In doing so, Enloe fundamentally challenges what constitutes the dominant reality of our understanding or international relations and its central objects of study and begins to [Page 251]open up spaces where new issues and perspectives focusing on the conditioning influence of gender may be developed. What was assumed to be a comprehensive view of the reality of the field is revealed to be only a partial and constructed one that relies on the obscuring of women's participation and the perpetuation of underlying gendered understandings.

...