Engendering International Relations Theory: The Feminist Standpoint

Engendering International Relations Theory: The Feminist Standpoint Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland. Gender and International Relations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. xn + 176 pp. ISBN 0-253-32613-3 (cl); 0-253-21265-0 (pb). J. Ann Tickner. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. xiv + 180 pp. ISBN 0-231-07538-34 (cl); 0-231-07539-1 (pb). Amy Swerdlow Both these books are valuable and pioneering contributions to the examination of gender issues in international relations theory and to an emerging feminist standpoint that is chaUenging the entire field. In the field of international relations, by contrast to such fields as history, philosophy , and anthropology, in which feminists have used gender as a category of analysis for over two decades, this kind of analysis dates only from the 1980s and is thus in its initial stages. In fad the entire academic disdptine of international relations is a relativdy recent enterprise which developed after World War I with the express purpose of preventing a repetition of the catastrophic events that led to that "great war." Because international relations theory obviously faüed to prevent World War I, and aU the wars big and smaU since then, it has been frequently reexamined from several viewpoints. Neorealism seeks to develop a positivist methodology from which to buüd a truly "objective sdence"; Marxism, according to J. Ann Tickner, the author of Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, uses more radical and presumably, more economic, approaches to move the field away from its excessively Western focus toward a consideration of the marginalized and colonized areas of the world system. The authors of these two volumes, the majority of whom are poUtical sdentists, approach their revision from the new perspective of gender. They aU contend that a disdptine that aims to develop a theory of inter-state interaction that could save the planet from ultimate self-destruction cannot fulfül its mission because its concept of the world is both skewed by gender bias and incomplete. J. Ann Tickner, Rebecca Grant, and Kathleen Newland assert that the study of gender and international relations ultimately requires us to examine the sodal construction of masculinity in Western thought and its influence on the theory and condud of international relations. That is what these two books do very weU, if a Uttle © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol 7 No. 2 (Summer) 1995 Book Review: Amy Swerdlow 161 repetitively. To their credit they are written in accessible prose, understandable to undergraduates as weU as graduate students. Tickner's book, because it is a monograph and not a coUection, is particularly weU organized and dearly focused. Both books buüd on the ideas of such first-wave ferninist gender theorists as Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox KeUer, Carolyn Merchant, Sarah Ruddick, and Carol Giltigan to make their case that aU state, as weU as inter-state, systems are fundamentaUy gendered structures of domination. The authors represented in both volumes are also indebted to the current critique of "falsely universalizing perspectives" and of the notion of "one true story" developed by feminist poststructuraUsts such as JuUa Kristeva, Jane Flax and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. These feminist theorists advance a positional, as opposed to an absolute, construction of meaning in their attempt to dismantle the claims of Western foundationaUst thought on which international relations theory is buüt. J. Ann Tickner, who is also a contributor to Gender and International Relations, agrees with many feminists in other disdptines that the gender bias of international relations theory arises from its roots in classical Western poUtical thought, constructed from models of human and state activity perceived and defined from a male perspective. Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland, editors and contributors to Gender and International Relations, contend in their introduction that women are excluded from international relations theory not only because they are, with rare exceptions, barred from the eUte circles of decision-making. More importantly , the disdptine assumes a gendered division of responsibitities and prerogatives that assigns women to reproductive work in the private sphere, and men to the duties and decisions of dtizenship, including soldiering and inter-state...