Feminism,International Theory,and International Relations of Gender Inequality

An informal document from the London School of Economics' preparations for an MSc option on Women and International Relations, for example, asserts that 'issues of the relationship between women and international relations have long remained marginal to the development of the I.R. discipline, both because of the silence of nearly all of the I.R. literature on gender issues, and because of the focus of most work relating to women on more particular and private perspectives'. It construes the emergent interest of the discipline in gender relations as the consequence of 'recent' developments in international relations at large which reflect women's increased participation. The document seeks to emphasise the relevance and importance of these developments to both academic study and public policy.

A. Jaggar , Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), p. 180.

Ibid., p. 33.

Ibid., pp. 28-32.

M. Mies , Capital Accumulation and Patriarchy on a Global Scale ( London: Zed, 1986), p. 19.

C.A. MacKinnon , 'Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: Towards a Feminist Jurisprudence', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Vol. 8, No. 4, 1983), p. 644.

Z. Eisenstein , The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (London: Longman, 1981), pp. 223-4.

A. Jaggar, op. cit., p. 29.

C.A. MacKinnon, op. cit., pp. 643-4. As MacKinnon argues, 'feminism must confront, on our own terms, the issue of the relations between state and society within a theory of social determination adequate to the specificity of sex ... Applied to women, liberalism has supported state intervention on behalf of women as abstract persons with abstract rights without scrutinising the content of these notions in gendered terms... Feminism has descriptions of the state's treatment of gender difference, but no analysis of the state as gender hierarchy. We need to know. Feminism has been caught between giving more power to the state in each attempt to claim it for women and leaving unchecked power in the society to men. The question for feminism, for the first time on its own terms is: what is this state, from women's point of view?'

See J.S. Maclean , 'Political Theory, International Theory and Problems of Ideology', Millennium: Journal of International Studies (Vol. 10, No. 2, 1981).

Ibid., pp. 109-10.

J.S. MacLean , 'Belief Systems and Ideology in International Relations' in Richard Little and Steve Smith (eds.), Belief Systems in International Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell , 1988).

J.S. Maclean , 'Political Theory, International Theory and Problems of Ideology', op. cit., p. 20.

See for example the collection by Dale Spender (ed.), Men's Studies Modified (London : Pergamon, 1981).

'Objectivity, the epistemological stance of which objectification is the social process, creates the reality it apprehends by defining as knowledge the reality it creates through its way of apprehending it', C.A. MacKinnon, op. cit., p. 636.

J. Lovenduski , 'Towards the Emasculation of Political Science ' in D. Spender (ed.), Men's Studies Modified (London: Pergamon, 1981), p. 144.

J.B. Elshtain , Women and War (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). See also J.B. Elshtain , Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought ( Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981).

J.B. Elshtain Women and War, op. cit., p. 88.

Ibid., pp. 90-1.

Ibid., p. 58.

See for example, J. Mepham and D.H. Ruben , Issues in Marxist Philosophy, Vol. 3: Epistemology, Science, Ideology (Brighton: Harvester , 1979).

C.A. MacKinnon , Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 9. MacKinnon's argument is that 'Gender is an outcome of a social process of subordination that is only ascriptively tied to body and doesn't lose its particularity of meaning when it shifts its embodied form. Femininity is a lowering that it imposed; it can be done to anybody and still be what feminine means. It is just women to whom it is considered natural'. Ibid., p. 234.

C. Delphy , Close to Home (London: Hutchison , 1984), p. 144.

Ibid., pp. 32-3.

P. Bourdieu , Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 167, 169.

Ibid., p. 166.

L. Irigary , 'This Sex Which is not One' in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (ed.), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), pp. 122-3.

M. Whitford , 'Luce Irigary and the Female Imaginary: Speaking as a Woman', Radical Philosophy (Summer 1984), p. 4.

L. Irigary, op. cit., p. 164.

'It is either a male imaginary bearing the morphological marks of the male body, whose cultural products are characterised by unity, teleology, linearity, self-identity etc., or it is a female imaginary, marked by the morphology of the female body, and characterised by plurality, non-linearity, fluid identity etc'. M. Whitford, op. cit., p, 4.

C. Delphy, op. cit., p. 212.

J.S. MacLean , 'BeJief Systems and Ideology in International Relations', op. cit.