[Note: The following is a guest post by Prof. Dan Reiter of Emory University]
Joshua Goldstein wrote in the preface to his award-winning, 2001 book War and Gender that while finishing his book he “discovered a list of unfinished research projects, which I had made fifteen years ago at the end of graduate school. About ten lines down is ‘gender and war,’ with the notation ‘most interesting of all; will ruin career—wait until tenure.’” This was probably not a completely inaccurate assessment, at the time. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the study of gender and international relations was viewed by many as outside the mainstream of IR, lending itself only to post-modern and critical methods of inquiry. Fortunately, during this period scholars such as Cynthia Enloe, Ann Tickner, Spike Peterson, and others sloughed off this marginalization, producing path-breaking work on gender and IR, asking new questions, posing new theoretical answers, and crafting entirely new agendas.
The status of the study of gender and IR could not be more different today than what it was when Goldstein wrote those words in the mid-1980s, as I describe in a forthcoming Journal of Conflict Resolution article. Since 2000 a new wave of scholars, including Laura Sjoberg, Charli Carpenter, Dara Cohen, Mary Caprioli, and others built on earlier work and broadened and deepened the study of gender and IR. The study of gender is now one of the hottest rising topics in IR. Even better, though in earlier days positivist IR scholars shied away from examining gender, positivist methods such as experiments, statistical analysis of observational data, surveys, and theory-testing case studies are now routinely employed to examine gender in IR alongside the other approaches. And, for those of us crassly interested in publishing in reputable outlets, gender/IR work now frequently appears in top journals and presses. The August 2013 issue of the American Political Science Review, for example, had three articles on gender and IR. Oxford University Press has an entire series on gender and international relations.
There are intriguing and important gender-related questions across the breadth of IR that have begun to be asked and answered. They include: What is the nature of the gender gap in public opinion on the use of force? What are the different ways in which terrorist and insurgent groups use females as combatants? What determines levels of sexual assault in wartime? Are female politicians less belligerent than male politicians? How does societal gender inequality condition a state’s propensity for intrastate and interstate conflict? How does gender condition public attitudes about foreign economic policy? How does a person’s sex affect his or her ability to perform the variety of functions of modern combat? How might gender affect the behavior of other international actors like judges and central bankers? What factors affect global gender equality norms? Can mixed gender units better perform peacekeeping and state security functions? This is an incomplete list, and many important, even fundamental puzzles concerning gender and IR remain largely unsolved. That is, there is much fresh, untilled soil for energetic scholars to cultivate.
And, gender lends itself quite nicely to positivist methods. Though biological sex does not equate to gender, they are of course correlated and sex is one of the easiest personal attributes to observe (much easier to observe than, say, attributes such as preferences or threat perception). The anatomy of how biological sex might affect behavior is directly observable, for example by monitoring testosterone levels in experimental subjects. And, though gender is endogenous to some factors, biological sex is largely exogenous, enabling scholars to skirt some causal inference problems. Last, the field is enjoying the publication of a wide variety of gender-related data sets, including WomanStats, Sexual Violence in Armed Conflicts, World Bank data, UN Development Programme data, and others.
Scholarship aside, gender is and will remain a critically important topic in current IR events. The next American president could be female. The national leaders of South Korea, Germany, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Liberia, Bangladesh, Norway, and a number of other countries are all female. We have the first ever American female chair of the Federal Reserve Bank. Women around the world continue to be the targets of gendered violence at horrific levels. A large part of what makes groups like Boko Haram and ISIS so abhorrent is their treatment of women and girls. The US military in 2013 committed to achieve gender integration in its military, and the UN continues to pursue gender integration of its peacekeeping forces. That is, in many important areas understanding current events and crafting foreign policy recommendations requires thinking about gender.
In short, we’ve now come full circle from Goldstein’s pessimistic mid-1980s viewpoint. For a bright young IR graduate student–female or not, feminist or not, positivist or not–gender is exactly what he or she might consider starting to work on to launch an exciting and rewarding research career.
Just as an aside, your co-blogger Megan MacKenzie is the one who got me to read about this subject.
:-)
I want to share your optimism– but the true measure of success is not how many “bright young IR graduate students” study the subject. It’s how many of us end up with jobs that let us continue that research. The number of U.S. postings that expressed an interest in hiring gender and politics scholars is up only slightly. This year was the first time I saw multiple postings in gender and IR–and while I guess 3 or 4 jobs (including interdisciplinary lines) is an improvement, it won’t be transformative in the discipline. Studying political issues that affect half the population should be more than “cutting edge” or a hiring fad.
While gender may now apparently be at the cutting edge of IR, if this post is anything to go by, IR as a discipline is even further away from being at the cutting edge of gender than many feminist and queer scholars feared.
Not only does Prof. Reiter seem to conflate “gender” and “women”, his claims that “gender lends itself quite nicely to positivist methods. Though biological sex does not equate to gender, they are of course correlated and sex is one of the easiest personal attributes to observe (much easier to observe than, say, attributes such as preferences or threat
perception)” and that “though gender is endogenous to some factors, biological sex is largely exogenous, enabling scholars to skirt some causal inference problems” are horrifically oversimplistic and essentialist.
Sex is categorically not “one of the easiest personal attributes to observe”. What can be observed is gender presentation (which is potentially distinct from gender identity) and, informed by societal gender norms, the apparent sex of the individual is then extrapolated (or, put more bluntly, guessed). Much of the time this guess will be “correct”, but far from always, as the experiences of even mildly gender non-conforming people (and I include all women in this group, given that male is the societal “default” gender) illustrate. The argument presented is rooted in pseudoscience that constructs gender and sex as fixed and binary and has been extensively critiqued for several decades, if not more, by scholars from many disciplines including IR. For anyone looking for an accessible starting point to learn more about this, one could do worse than Cordelia Fine’s “Delusions of Gender”.
Moving on from sheer inaccuracy of the claim that sex can be observed, the idea that gender can be treated as a variable is highly problematic. Uncritically reducing gender to “female” or “male”as the author seems to suggest ignores people’s situated, embodied, dynamic, contingent and intersectional experiences of gender and obscures the very specificities and nuances that a “gendered lens” uses to generate new insights into all aspects of the social world – including international relations. While it can be argued that a degree of generalisation is necessary and/or unavoidable, the notion that one can talk meaningfully about women (or indeed men) as a homogenous category has been roundly critiqued at length, with the debate increasingly having moved from just asking “where are the women?” to “who are the women?” and how does gender mean? (i.e. how is gender constructed and what are the implications of this).
Unfortunately Prof. Reiter appears to have missed all these debates (or at least has ignored them for the purposes of this post). In doing, he has presented an account of gender’s relevance to IR that reduces it to an apparently fashionable abstract – and argubly empty – concept stripped of its intellectual and political history and ability to generate insights into why gender matters, including demonstrating how essentialised and binary notions of gender help perpetuate inequalities and violence against people of all genders and sexes.
It’s immensely disheartening and disappointing to see this sort of post on a blog that aims to be at the cutting edge of IR debates and often succeeds. It may well be that “gender” is the next big thing for mainstream IR, but if it means the resurgence of essentialist and binary understandings of gender, then it is nothing to celebrate. From this perspective, the real take home message of this piece is that far from coming “full circle”, there is a new potential threat to critically-engaged, politically-aware feminist and queer IR scholarship as “gender” is depoliticised (dare I say neutered?) in order to make it an acceptable topic of study, in the process facilitating the continued disciplining of feminists and queers for being too political/personal/emotional/subjective. Truly plus ca change, plus ca meme chose…
Great points Cai. I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of both the limitations of mainstream engagements with gender, and the drawbacks of large quantitative gender analysis (like the WomenStats). These big projects have done a lot to raise awareness of women’s issues and to point to broad trends (i.e. the relationship between education and poverty, violence and women’s representation etc); however, they remain projects about women, not gender. In turn, the reinforcement of women as a unified and quantifiable category is ongoing and in fact a dependent factor in the analysis.
In this light, do you (Cai or anyone else that wants to weigh in) think it is possible that some ‘advances’ in the study and focus on women have detracted from our collective ability to critically engage on issues of sexuality, gender construction, and gender norms?
I think Cindy covered this in her recent post on gentrification, no? Or even back in 1994 in her essay on ‘good girls, little girls and bad girls’. While I appreciate that, to some, it might seem like ‘progress’ to have a respected scholar affirm that ‘gender is and will remain a critically important topic in current IR events’, it is such a depoliticised conceptualisation of gender, situated within such a partial and limited rendering of feminist scholarship, that I don’t think it’s progress at all.
I think it’s about making (some) feminist work ‘safe’ for the discipline to engage with and appropriating (some) feminist concepts to suit a pre-established research agenda without acknowledging the fundamental feminist insight that gender is a power relation, and is not reducible to a tick-box in an interview protocol.
As an aside, the claim that biological sex correlates with gender and that the former is easy to observe is profoundly problematic for all of the reasons that Cai so eloquently explains above. This assertion completely erases the existence and experience of trans*, genderqueer, and gender-nonconforming people as well as the epic amounts of scholarship on precisely this topic. Cordelia Fine is a grand place to start, see also Anne Fausto-Sterling, David Valentine & Riki Anne Wilchins, Judith Butler.
It is one thing to make grand (and no doubt well-meaning) validating gestures towards the research of a whole ‘camp’ of IR (to use Christine Syvlester’s term) that in their attempt to validate somewhat miss the mark, but it is another thing to make an assertion about bodies and biology that at best ignores whole groups of people and at worst implies that their existence/experience is irrelevant.
Well put Cai. Nothing to add there.
Thank you Cai and Laura for clearly and eloquently stating some of the many problems with this blog post.
I’d like to add this to the discussion – from young adult literature: https://www.amazon.com/None-Above-I-W-Gregorio/dp/0062335316
Just saying’