IR: The Resurrection

Abstract

By giving center stage to popular films rather than to IR theory, this article examines the processes of political evacuation and disciplinary incorporation as they occur to postmodernism and feminism in relation to the discipline of IR, and particularly in relation to Wendtian constructivism and Jonesian gender. This approach enables me to pose two provocative (if necessarily illusive) questions — `What constitutes mainstream IR these days?' and `How is this mainstream socially, culturally and popularly constructed?' The article's contribution is threefold. It is familiarly `critical', for it draws critical attention to mainstream IR theory, whatever that may be. It is `functional', for it exceeds critique by demonstrating how IR blunts radical critiques like postmodernism and feminism, all the while pointing to their incorporated albeit politically evacuated remnants as evidence of the seriousness with which IR takes pluralized debate. And it is what I would term `everyday pedagogical', not because it uses popular films to illustrate IR examples but because by emphasizing the everydayness of film over the disciplinarity of IR it teaches us how the social, cultural and popular simultaneously enable and disable IR theory to `be'.