(a letter I’ve thought about writing a dozen times over the last decade of being a feminist researcher)
Dear Dr. Journal Editor,
I submitted an article to your (big) journal in my (general) field. I don’t know if it was of the quality to be published in your (spiffy) journal or not, but, to be honest, I was trusting you to figure that out. You betrayed my trust, and in spades.
Your journal presents a pluralistic face, and lets in the occasional article that transgresses the norms of traditional social science. In fact, I do a lot of reviews for your journal and many journals like it … I’m the person that you send stuff you don’t really understand to, and you often trust me to vet it.
I’m worthy of that trust. I will tell you if research in my “ism” or “paradigm” or epistemological approach is great and pathbreaking, or if it downright stinks. I don’t write better reviews for feminist poststructuralist work (which I like) than for the next positivist democratic peace article (which makes my epistemological instincts cringe) – I judge them each on their own terms (or at the very least on the terms of their particular approach to international studies)…because that’s what a good reviewer does, and, I think, what a good journal editor does.
So why doesn’t your journal give (my) feminist work that courtesy?
Because for all of your platitudes about the need to escape from paradigmatic approaches to IR, and having heard the perestroika movement, you still fundamentally don’t understand non-positivist work generally and feminist work specifically?
My article will find a publication outlet with as intense scrutiny as your journal but not as much (methodological, epistemological, or ontological) closed-mindedness that your journal has. Why? Because, though its not perfect and could benefit from good reviews, its not bad work, and you’d know that if you read it without blinders on. I know my field well enough to know that any two (or three or five) feminist reviewers taking the article on its own terms would have recommended an R&R. And I think a journal editor concerned with taking what I do seriously would have given it one.
Why do I care that it didn’t get one?
Its not about my publication record – I’m happy with that, and, though a few more articles in the “big” journals like yours might make my (academic) life easier, I’m happy with it as it is.
I sent the article to your journal because I consider your journal to be important in the field, including in the sort of work that I do, an impression that had been validated in the past with experiences I’ve had (as a manuscript writer and a reviewer) with feminist work being evaluated on its own terms, rather than having other (inappropriate for this work) standards be used as a measuring stick to which it will (by epistemological definition) not measure up. Note that this has nothing to do with whether the article is ultimately accepted or my advice as a reviewer ultimately taken … but with the integrity of the process.
You sent my work to people who just don’t understand, and, fundamentally, don’t want to. Which is their prerogative, but I thought your journal was (and it should be) above that.
For example, both reviewers attribute a “hypothesis” to the article – it has no such thing, nor would I claim such a thing for it. The first reviewer also attributes variables to the article, which, strictly speaking, the article doesn’t claim, and wouldn’t want to. Both reviewers note that the chosen “variables” are “bad measures;” that’s certainly true … of course, because there’s no such thing as a “good measure” of something intangible that people lie about anyway. The work has a different purpose – establishing potential consistency, showing theoretical logic, etc. It must, because its empirical argument is fundamentally “unproveable” in traditional terms and its epistemological stance not particularly committed to the idea of provability.
On one hand, its your journal’s choice to by default exclude work that doesn’t conform to the scientific method; it is also your journal’s choice, and indeed its right, to reject my work for whatever reason, or no reason at all.
That said, I believe(d) in your journal as a pluralist outlet that would try to think through/think about work across the positivist/postpositivist divide, and regardless of the “ism” from which it came. That’s why it was disappointing that the article was sent to people who quite clearly had not even the most basic literacy in feminist theorizing in IR, and even more disappointing that they (therefore) criticize the article both from an epistemological standpoint which it/I reject and from a place of complete theoretical ignorance.
The point is not that your journal (or others) shouldn’t publish positivist work. Or that your journal (or others) should publish the particular article I submitted. Or even that this experience is out of the ordinary for me. The point is instead is that pluralism is more than seeing someone use “gender” as a variable and publishing it … it is critically thinking about and engaging different approaches to how one thinks about global politics. A pluralist model should evaluate work on its own terms, and the journal review process I just experienced in the review process strayed from that, and that’s disappointing to me, especially given that your journal has a fairly recent history of fairness and pluralism, for real. A pluralist review process doesn’t require ignoring the things that divide us, but working hard to talk over, through, and past those divides.
Combining these reviews with the recent table(s) of contents of the journal, well, I think I’m not so sure anymore, and that’s disappointing. Its disappointing especially given the uphill battle it takes to convince (previously burned) feminist scholars to engage at all … and the fact that, so long as journals like yours are (de jure or de facto) closed to feminist work, it will remain at the margins of American IR, given the feedback loop between elite journals and tenure and promotion at elite institutions.
I “lost” this battle, and dozens like it. And each time I, or someone else, loses, and feminist work is excluded from journals like yours (even when there are token feminist scholars on the editorial board), it does hurt the relative position and power of feminist scholarship in the US R1 university community. But you (and scholars like you) think about these things from a site of power, and can fairly easily categorize this stuff as “bad” work. And, given your rejection rate, I have company. But this one matters to me.
Why? See Part II soon.
Best,
Laura Sjoberg
…who does feminist research and has never claimed otherwise
I see a lot of what you said playing out as a graduate student in my own graduate program (in terms of the evaluation of non-positivist/non-variable driven research on positivist grounds). My curiousness is in the way that feminism plays out as a contested site of approaches of science, as not all feminists are post-positivists or post-structuralists. Obviously Tickner — some time ago — made an argument against Keohane and his program for feminists to take their critiques of IR into the realm of variables and hypothesis testing. A lot of feminists in IR agreed with Tickner's stance, but I'm loathe to make claims for a whole category. In journals, do you see researchers/theorists within IR who claim a feminist positivist program fighting against those who claim a feminist non-positivist stance? Or is this really not happening within feminist theory and more a contest between feminism and other approaches?
Been there, suffered from that, if not with feminist theory, but rather with other heterodox stuff. Too often the journals with the highest “impact factors” are nothing more than gatekeepers of orthodoxy. Happily I'm at a stage in my career where I can research and write what I please and publish in the journals and presses that I find interesting.
Matt – the policing of boundaries is not limited to contestations between feminist and non-feminist approaches. Part of what keeps feminist IR vibrant and innovative is its own critical engagement with itself, I think, and there is a number of interventions on both 'sides' regarding the use of gender as a variable in research, including but not limited to the classic exchange between Adam Jones and Terrell Carver, Molly Cochrane and Judith Squires. And for a great example of a critical exchange on the post-positivist 'side' of the discipline, see the pieces by Cindy Weber and Mark Lafffey in the latest issue of Review of International Studies, which kept me in my office past home-time…
Looking forward to Part II – but a point of clarification? Was it the feminist they objected to or the non-positivist? The former is, I fear (and it surprises even me to say it) easier to overcome…
@Laura … I think it was some strange combination of both. The article was odd, in that it had regressions in it, but not used for the traditional purposes of regressions in political science. I think that the reviewers and the editors likely assumed the regressions were used for traditional purposes, and read them as bad for that reason. And there are specific points in the reviews which show that a lot of the misinterpretation came from not understanding the “work” that “gender as a variable” does, but assuming one does.
@Matt, this is an interesting question, and one I'll play with more in future posts. For me (and speaking for no one else), “positivist feminism” is an oxymoron (even in a way that “liberal feminism” is not), and feminist approaches, while they can incorporate some of the assumptions of positivist work (like my article, which assumed the utility of knowing statistically significant relationships), they are at odds, and “positivist feminist” work produces bad empirical and normative approaches. But that judgment isn't per se for me to make. Laura Shepherd' answer to the rest of the question is excellent, and leaves little for me to add.
@Renee, true, but it is an interesting confluence of stars aligning to, I think, make it a different problem for feminist IR (in the US at least), where the stakes are not so much about the career of the writer (though I'll cop to that mattering to me) as to the viability of sustaining feminist research programs in the US – which rely on these journal/book publisher rankings and the tenure system that privileges them.
I strongly believe this post represents the deterioration of the field of IR. The term 'feminist' IR is normatively offensive as if to suggest the entire enterprise has been and continues to be broken. What does 'feminist' IR even mean? Is it to suggest that there are not enough women actively engaged as IR scholars? This may have been true many years ago but female IR scholars have increased dramatically and have certainly made massive in roads with respect to job placement (often at the expense of other well or better qualified candidates, but this is an entirely different blog topic). Futhermore, should we reasonably assume the IR enterprise, its questions, methods, and findings would look radically different today had their been more female IR scholars/'feminist' research at the very beginnings of modern IR scholarship? This argument is even more offensive on at least 2 counts. In purely academic terms, we as IR scholars operate from the scientific/positivist and rationalist models (as do scientists at large). The scientific method and rational choice are explicitly gender neutral: the rules and logic of science and rationality do not vary by gender, so whether the IR scholar who employs these tools of inquiry is male or female is de facto irrelevant. 'Feminist' IR scholars who claim IR scholarship suffers due to lack of feminist input are therefore directly contradicting the foundational assumptions of science and rationality. This is offensive and silly. Secondly, if the 'feminist' IR scholars are arguing that international politics would play out drastically different (and thus our understanding of IR would be drastically different) should women have more actual political leadership roles then this argument fails anectodally. Leaders such as Thatcher, Meir, and Indira Gandhi (as well as others, I'm sure) suggest international politics are played according to the institutions at work and the goals and capabilities of political leaders. Gender does not enter the equation at all.
It is impossible for the term 'feminist' IR to sound anymore inane: should we have 'black' IR? 'Asian' IR? 'Aboriginal' IR? Why would these approaches be any less valuable using the logic that 'feminist' IR scholars employ? The truth is such a fractionalization would mean islands of idiosyncratic research agendas and 'findings' that, collectively, would tell us probably nothing about IR and the way the world works.
To conclude, 'feminist' IR is fruitless and normatively offensive at best, dangerous at worst. I read and appreciate IR research regardless of gender and it just so happens the very best female IR scholars are excellent political scientists, not 'feminist' IR scholars.
I gotta get back to South Park now.
Serious question: as a post-positivist who rejects the scientific method on epistemological grounds, why would you be distraught at not being accepted into positivist journals that accept the scientific method as their guiding principle? It just seems like trying to force a proudly non-scientific (ascientific? agscientific? Not sure what your preferred nomenclature is) research agenda into a proudly scientific field is a waste of time, on both ends. I say this as someone with at least a passing interest in normative non-positivist IR, even though my work is in the positivist vein.
I'm especially confused as to how you could use regression in a non-positivist way. Regression involves positivist assumptions about the nature of data and the data-generating process in order to work. If you discard/ignore/reject those assumptions or their implications, I have no idea how anyone could accept your interpretation of the stats. For example, you explicitly reject having a hypothesis, but regression is quite literally meaningless without one. Maybe you have a positivist on/off switch? I obviously don't know, because I haven't read the piece. But I can see why this would be a high bar to clear even if feminism per se had nothing to do with it.
Pluralism, fine, yes I agree, whatever, but I doubt there's a ton of rat-choice articles in those other journals that you think this article would be automatically R&Red into. True, I don't know that, but then I couldn't because you don't use proper names, and your CV indicates that you regularly publish in a wide variety of places. So either this paper has a characteristic that is absent from your other work, or you're submitting to a different journal than before, or you just got a bad set of reviewers. Which happens. But it's difficult to adjudicate any of this, b/c you aren't really clear on any relevant details. (And perestroika wasn't about abandoning positivism and the scientific method. Anything but.)
Point is… what's the point? Maybe it's true that they “just don't get it”. Maybe it's true that different journals (or for that matter, disciplines/sub-disciplines) exist to serve different audiences, and tailor their content accordingly. So maybe they get it just fine. C'est la vie.
First, 'non-feminist's' comments about the inanity of feminist scholarship is ignorant. Read, say, Lene Hansen's 'Little Mermaid' piece, and then tell me how you get there with Waltz or Keohane. (With Wendt you could make the argument, but the modifications to Wendt that you'd need would probably make it unrecognizable relative to the original formulation.) Read some good feminist literature before you dismiss it. If you don't learn something in the process, you're not thinking hard enough. (BTW, the other types of IR you list with pejoratively dropped adjectives do exist and are generally referred to as 'subaltern studies' collectively. There's a lot of sentimental drivel to be found in there, but a lot of original and thoughtful work too. I don't know where you work, amigo, but you'd fail a senior undergrad theory seminar anywhere I've worked.)
As for the substance of the letter, I'm sympathetic, but I disagree. Getting published in any given journal is not a right, it's a privilege granted by the publisher/editor(s), and they absolutely have a RIGHT to determine the content of their publications. The unnamed journal may be a leading light of the mainstream, and it might be your ambition to challenge this mainstream, and they might be able to help you do this by publishing material like yours, but why should they? If they're comfortable with the status quo and you're not, who bears the onus of changing it? What sense would it make for them to alienate the market they've presumably spent years establishing? A journal is an enterprise, and few enterprises succeed as democracies. If your beef is that they're excluding perspectives, well, they're under no obligation to be inclusive.
It's also peculiar to make this one journal liable for a perceived defect of a whole community. You're blaming a tree for the existence of a forest. If the problem is that your work isn't competitive by their standards, then it would be more effective to challenge their standards than to whine about how they apply them consistently. How? Well, start a journal to feature and promulgate work like yours. Sure, there are institutional hurdles to be overcome, but if they couldn't be overcome, Millennium wouldn't exist, Int. Pol. Sociology wouldn't exist, and most big European journals (Review of International Studies, EJIR, etc.) wouldn't exist. If you can't join 'em, beat 'em dammit!
@non-feminist: I take the questions in this post seriously, and think that the answers to them would (at the very least) change your analysis. I would answer them here, but actually have a couple of posts lined up (the “Part II” post is about why I care about this particular journal/article, then I've written three posts about what feminist IR is and what it means to do). I hope you engage with those.
@wkw, first, the next post will have more of the relevant details about the article (though perhaps not as many as you'd like).
As someone who has some background in math outside of political science, the mathematical assumptions behind regressions aren't as strictly positivist as one might assume seeing them in political science articles and journals. Will my use ultimately fly? I guess I don't know, though there's a “quantitative methods for critical theorists” book project on the “to do” list where a bunch of that might be worked out. But its not a positivist on/off switch by any sense of the imagination. Since I still plan to send the article out again, I can't illustrate in full here (and that's why both posts are scant on the details), but I will be interested in having the discussion when I can.
If I'd sent the article to a rat choice journal, I'd deserve my lumps getting rejected. I don't think that would be normatively right, etc., but that's beside the point. I didn't though. I sent it to a generalist journal that claims to be representative of the field more generally, and has explicitly claimed on a number of occasions to be pluralist …which, I argue, is more riding on the coattails of former editors than reflective of the journal's current practice. It would be in poor taste to “out” the journal, since, as Ben notes above, it is a wider practice than the journal I'm currently not particularly happy with.
Given that generalist journals claim to represent the field as a whole, the message that rejecting particular sorts of work (or sending it to reviewers who clearly will reject it on face, then listening to those reviews) sends is that they don't belong in the field.
I realize, looking forward to being a journal editor, there will be some gatekeeping involved …what is “in” my subfield and what is not “in” it. That said, those decisions are different for a subfield journal or a specialist journal than a generalist journal, and, if they are not, there's a problem, IMHO.
That problem is about power dynamics in the field. Which is the subject of the next post :)
@Ben: from the post…
“its your journal's choice to by default exclude work that doesn’t conform to the scientific method; it is also your journal’s choice, and indeed its right, to reject my work for whatever reason, or no reason at all.”
Getting published in any journal is absolutely not a right; especially a big, selective, “generalist” journal. Said unnamed journal can (and currently does) choose to represent (only or mostly) the mainstream of the discipline, even if that was not true before. But that's the important thing in the letter: the journal was a decent pluralist journal (so the audience alienation argument doesn't fly), and now its not.
Your argument, though, ignores power dynamics in the field. There's a reason why there are a lot of feminist IR scholars outside the United States (though many of them are Americans) and not that many inside the United States. Its because the “start your own journal” argument doesn't work for the tenure and promotion system at elite research universities in the United States. Yet, faculty at those universities play a key role in what's “in” and what's “out” of the field.
FWIW, there's a great feminist IR journal, where, in my experience, the robustness of the publishing process is every bit as high as elite generalist journals. I can't figure out how to link in a comment, but its the International Feminist Journal of Politics. I have published there, and will also be taking over as one of three editors of the journal in July.
That said, IMHO, the thing that sucks about IR is its camp mentality, especially since those “camps” differ widely in terms of relative power and prestige. My career interest is in mainstreaming feminist IR. But more on that in the second post.
You keep on using that word [“positivism”]. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Fair enough on all points. Looking forward to future posts (and reading the actual article).
@Dan, you (and others, including PTJ) who have pointed this out are right that I use the word somewhat carelessly. That said, the catch-all way in which I use it (to indicate, in Hollis/Smith's terms, the explaining/understanding divide; in Robert Cox's, the problem-solving/critical theory divide; in Tickner's terms, the question of the possibility of objective knowledge) is replicated enough in the field that I don't think its a total sin to do so. But I will be more careful in the future. I'm sure I'm being careless with it, but I'm pretty sure that people whose general ideas I am following (like Cox and Linklater) are being more careful (Linklater defines it as having three assumptions: objective external reality, subject/object distinction, and value-free social science). Rejecting all three seems to put work on the outside of acceptability in this particular journal, which has not always been the case.
I think its possible to wield statistical tools (possibly) and mathematical tools (certainly) in ways that do not require/use/need those assumptions but are still intellectually/empirically productive.
Laura: I wasn't just talking to you. FWIW, I don't think Cox and Linklater are “being more careful.”
I agree. Equations are ways of manipulating descriptions. Any argument to causation is imported by the author.
Oops. Hit [post] before I got to the punchline.
So arguments against your use of math basically reduce to arguments that mathematical methods are incapable of yielding interesting insights about those descriptions. Fair enough. But once considered this way, I think there's room for productive debate.
[/Hayward Alker]
Maybe I'm just being cranky, but I don't get the point of arguing about what positivism means or requires (though I get that lots of people do see a point). There are lots of positivisms, and they are not always consistent with each other, though they may share some fundamental assumptions (which are, to say the least, questionable). Wittgenstein, family resemblances, etc. It seems unproductive to me to say “No, that's not positivist” when one could instead read a piece as challenging what we mean by positivism. Unless you hold that there is something that positivism just essentially *is* (and I'm not sure how you can do that), then I don't really see a problem.
What is offensive and silly is to rant about feminism without bothering to do the most basic work on what it means. 'Feminist' does not mean 'written by a woman' and 'feminist IR' does not mean 'IR written by women'. It never has. I am not aware of any work of feminist IR which claims this. To be able to speak in such unabashed ways about 'logic' and 'science' without recourse to the most introductory chapter on what feminism means in IR is embarassing.
Because “positivism” has become an empty signifier for whatever counts as “mainstream methods.” There are a number of ways this impoverishes our discussions of methods and epistemology, not least of which that it conflates the two.
Всем привет, Скромнее нужно быть
wooohoo nice post!