The International Bias That Dare Not Speak Its Name
I have suggested that the most important, and surely a lasting, contribution of feminist critiques has been to add a gender dimension to analyses of international relations. Few scholars will be able, in future, to analyze international divisions of labor, or peace movements, or (pate Cynthia Enloe) the activities of international diplomats, without attending to feminist perspectives on all these phenomena. But feminists' success in exploring the gender variable remains, at this point, mixed. And until feminist frameworks are expanded and to some extent reworked, it is hard to see how a persuasive theory or account of the gendering of international relations can be constructed.
Feminist attempts to incorporate a gender variable into IR analysis are constrained by the basic feminist methodology and all feminists’ normative commitments. A genuinely "feminist approach” by definition “must take women’s lives as the epistemological starting point."1 And a defining element of feminist approaches is a social project aimed at ameliorating women’s structured lack of privilege and emancipating them as a gender-class. The result is a defacto equating of gender primarily with females/femininity. It is, in its way, a new logocentrism, whereby (elite) male actions and (hegemonic) masculinity are drawn into the narrative mainly as independent variables explaining “gender” oppression. Even those works that have adopted the most inclusive approach to gender, such as Peterson and Runyan's Global Gender Issues, betray this leaning. Peterson and Runyan do acknowledge that “our attention to gender . . . tends to underplay the considerable differences among men and among women," and note that “it is not only females but males as well who suffer from rigid gender roles.” For the most part in their analysis, though, “gender issues" are presented as coequal with women’s issues. The plight of embodied women is front and center throughout, while the attention paid to the male/masculine realm amounts to little more than lip service.
Toward an international politics of gender (1996) in: Adam Jones (2 December 2008). Gender Inclusive: Essays on violence, men, and feminist international relations. Routledge. p. 77. ISBN 978-1-135-97399-5.