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Economic engagement occurs against the backdrop of an international gendered
division of labor. Contemporary economic analysis valorizes mobile capital and
hyperprofits while erasing the economic contributions of women, minorities, and
immigrants.
Sassen-96 (Saskia, Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Columbia, “Toward a Feminist
Analytics of the Global Economy,” 4 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 7 1996-1997)
The master images in the currently dominant account about economic globalization in media and policy
circles, as well as in much economic analysis, emphasize hypermobility, global communications, and
the neutralization of place and distance. Key concepts in that account--globalization, information
economy, and telematics--all suggest that place no longer matters and that the only type of worker
that matters is the highly educated professional. This account privileges the capability for global
transmission over the material infrastructure that makes transmission possible; information outputs
over the workers producing those outputs, from specialists to secretaries; and the new transnational
corporate culture over the multiplicity of work cultures, including immigrant cultures, within which many
of the "other" jobs of the global information economy take place. In brief, the dominant narrative
concerns itself with the upper circuits of capital, not the lower ones; and particularly with the
hypermobility of capital rather than place-bound capital. Massive trends toward the spatial dispersal of
economic activities at the metropolitan, national, and global level represent only half of what is
happening. Alongside the well-documented spatial dispersal of economic activities, new forms of
territorial centralization of top-level management and control operations have appeared. National and
global markets, as well as globally integrated operations, require central places where the work of
globalization gets done. Further, information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing
strategic nodes with hyperconcentration of facilities. Finally, even the most advanced information
industries have a production process. Once this production process is brought into the analysis, we see
that secretaries are part of it, and so are the cleaners of the buildings where the professionals do their
work. An economic configuration very different from that suggested by the concept information
economy emerges. We recover the material conditions, production sites, and place-boundedness that
are also part of globalization and the information economy. There is a tendency in the mainstream
account to take the existence of a global economic system as a given, a function of the power of
transnational corporations and global communications. But the capabilities for global operation,
coordination, and control contained in the new information technologies and in the power of
transnational corporations need to be produced. By focusing on the production of these capabilities we
add a neglected dimension to the familiar issue of the power of large corporations and the new
technologies. The emphasis shifts to the practices that constitute what we call economic globalization
and global control: the work of producing and reproducing the organization and management of a global
production system and a global marketplace for finance, both under conditions of economic
concentration. A focus on practices draws the categories of place and work process into the analysis of
economic globalization. These are two categories easily overlooked in accounts centered on the
hypermobility of capital and the power of transnationals. Developing categories such as place and
production process does not negate the importance of hypermobility and power. Rather, it brings to the
fore the fact that many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile
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and are, indeed, deeply embedded in place, notably places such as global cities and export processing
zones. Global processes are structured by local constraints, including the composition of the
workforce, work cultures, and political cultures, and other processes within nation-states. Further, by
emphasizing the fact that global processes are at least partly embedded in national territories, such a
focus introduces new variables in current conceptions about economic globalization and the shrinking
regulatory role of the State. That is to say, the space economy for major new transnational economic
processes diverges in significant ways from the duality global/national presupposed in much analysis of
the global economy. The duality "national versus global" suggests two mutually exclusive spaces-- where
one begins the other ends. Nation-states play a role in the implementation of global economic systems,
a role that can assume different forms depending on development levels, political culture, and mode of
articulation with global processes.'9 Reintroducing the State in analyses of globalization creates a
conceptual opening for an examination of how this transformed State, specifically the growing power of
certain agencies, articulates the gender question. One instantiation of this reconfigured State is the
ascendance of Treasury and the decline of departments dealing with the social fund, from housing to
health and welfare.'0 Recapturing the geography of places involved in globalization allows us to
recapture people, workers, communities, and more specifically, the many different work cultures, apart
from the corporate culture, involved in the work of globalization.2 The global city can be seen as one
strategic research site for the study of these processes. This type of city is a structure that contributes to
the differentiation of culture and of the many forms of localization of global processes.22 One of the
central concerns in my work has been to look at cities as production sites for the leading information
industries of our time and to recover the infrastructure of activities, firms, and jobs necessary to run the
advanced corporate economy.' These industries are typically conceptualized in terms of the
hypermobility of their outputs and the high levels of expertise of their professionals rather than in terms
of the production process involved and the requisite infrastructure of facilities and non-expert jobs that
are also part of these industries. A detailed analysis of service-based urban economies shows that
there is considerable articulation of firms, sectors, and workers who may appear as though they have
little connection to an urban economy dominated by finance and specialized services, but in fact fulfill
a series of functions that are an integral part of that economy. They do so, however, under conditions
of sharp social, earnings, and, often, sex and racial/ethnic segmentation.' In the day-to-day work of
the leading services complex dominated by finance, a large share of the jobs involved are low pay
and manual, many held by women and immigrants . Although these types of workers and jobs are
never represented as part of the global economy, they are in fact part of the infrastructure of jobs
involved in running and implementing the global economic system, including such an advanced form
of it as international finance.25 The top end of the corporate economy-the corporate towers that
project engineering expertise, precision, "techne"--is far easier to mark as necessary for an advanced
economic system than are truckers and other industrial service workers, even though these are a
necessary ingredient.26 We see here at work a dynamic of valorization that has sharply increased the
distance between the devalorized and the valorized, indeed overvalorized, sectors of the economy.
Some of the developments described above can be read as constituting a new geography of centrality
and marginality. This new geography partly reproduces existing inequalities but also is the outcome of a
dynamic specific to current modes of economic growth. It assumes many forms and operates in many
arenas, from the distribution of telecommunications facilities to the structure of the economy and of
employment. Global cities accumulate immense concentrations of economic power while cities that
were once major manufacturing centers suffer inordinate declines; the downtowns of cities and business
centers in metropolitan areas receive massive investments in real estate and telecommunications while
low-income urban and metropolitan areas are starved for resources. Highly educated workers in the
corporate sector see their incomes rise to unusually high levels while low- or medium-skilled workers see
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their incomes sink. Financial services produce superprofits while industrial services barely survive. This is
not a fixed geography; some of its components are quite volatile and some of its spaces are contested.
Yet, there are also strong forces contributing to reproduce these configurations, though not necessarily
all elements within them."'
Gendered structures of international relations and politics culminate in environmental
destruction, nuclear war, and extinction
Tickner 1992
(J. Ann Tickner, Professor of International Relations at USC. Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. 1992, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/)
In the modern West, women's activities have typically been associated with a devalued world of
reproduction and maintenance, while men's have been tied to what have been considered the more
elevated tasks of creating history and meaning. Yet all these activities are equally important for human well-being. History
and the construction of meaning help us to achieve the kind of security that comes from an understanding of who we are as individuals and as
citizens, while reproduction and maintenance are necessary for our survival. In
the discourse of international politics, however,
our national identities as citizens have been tied to the heroic deeds of warrior-patriots and our
various states' successful participation in international wars. This militarized version of national
identity has also depended on a devaluation of the identities of those outside the boundaries of the
state. Additionally, it has all but eliminated the experiences of women from our collective national
memories. A less militarized version of national identity, which would serve us better in the
contemporary world where advances in technology are making wars as dangerous for winners as for
losers, must be constructed out of the equally valued experiences of both women and men. To foster
a more peaceful world, this identity must also rest on a better understanding and appreciation of the
histories of other cultures and societies. The multidimensional nature of contemporary insecurities also highlights the
importance of placing greater public value on reproduction and maintenance. In a world where nuclear war could destroy
the earth and most of its inhabitants, we can no longer afford to celebrate the potential death of
hundreds of thousands of our enemies; the preservation of life, not its destruction, must be valued.
The elimination of structural violence demands a restructuring of the global economy so that
individuals' basic material needs take priority over the desire for profit. An endangered natural
environment points to the need to think in terms of the reproduction rather than the exploitation of
nature. This ethic of caring for the planet and its inhabitants has been devalued by linking it to the
private realm associated with the activities of women; yet caring and responsibility are necessary
aspects of all dimensions of life, public and private. They will be valued in the public realm only when men participate
equally in the private realm in tasks associated with maintenance and responsibility for child rearing. If we are to move toward a more secure
future, what we value in the public realm, including the realm of international politics, should not be so rigidly separated from the values we
espouse in the home.
The alternative is to reject the affirmative’s knowledge production in favor of
examining politics through a gendered lens.
Tickner 1997
(J. Ann Tickner - Professor in the School of International Relations at University of Southern California,
President of the International Studies Association, the most respected and widely known scholarly
association in this field - Dec., 1997 “You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between
Feminists and IR Theorists” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4.)
Many of these issues seem far removed from the concerns of international relations. But, employing bottom-up rather than
top-down explanations, feminists claim that the operation of the global economy and states' attempts to
secure benefits from it are built on these unequal social relations between women and men which work
to the detriment of women's (and certain men's) security. For example, states that successfully compete in attracting
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multinational corporations often do so by promising them a pool of docile cheap labor consisting of
young unmarried women who are not seen as "breadwinners" and who are unlikely to organize to protest working conditions and
low wages (Enloe, 1990: 151-76). When states are forced to cut back on government spending in order to comply with structural adjustment
programs, it is often the expectation that women, by virtue of their traditional role as care-givers, will perform the welfare tasks previously
assumed by the state without remuneration. According to Caroline Moser (1 99 1 : 105), structural adjustment programs
dedicated to
economic "efficiency" are built on the assumption of the elasticity of women's unpaid labor. In presenting some
feminist perspectives on security and some explanations for insecurity, I have demonstrated how feminists are challenging
levels of analysis and boundaries between inside and outside which they see, not as discrete constructs
delineating boundaries between anarchy and order, but as contested and mutually constitutive of one
another. Through a reexamination of the state, feminists demonstrate how the unequal social relations on which
most states are founded both influence their external security-seeking behavior and are influenced by
it. Investigating states as gendered constructs is not irrelevant to understanding their security- seeking
behaviors as well as whose interests are most served by these behaviors. Bringing to light social structures that support
war and "naturalize" the gender inequalities manifested in markets and households is not irrelevant for
understanding their causes. Feminists claim that the gendered foundations of states and markets must be
exposed and challenged before adequate understandings of, and prescriptions for, women's (and certain
men's) security broadly defined can be formulated.
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Links
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State Link
Status quo analyses of international law center on the State as the primary actor in
global politics—this confines women to a domestic sphere outside the scope of
international analysis
Sassen-96 (Saskia, Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Columbia, “Toward a Feminist
Analytics of the Global Economy,” 4 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 7 1996-1997)
The particular form that the feminist critique of international law is taking has the effect of avoiding the
question of sovereignty, and the implications of its unbundling for the emergence of new actors in crossborder relations and as subjects of international law. In a critical review of the feminist scholarship on
international law, Knop notes that personifying the State has the effect of denying the individual and
collective identity of women within a State and across States.' Women are confied to the realm of the
given State and rendered invisible from the perspective of international law insofar as they are
subsumed under the State's sovereignty. Her central argument is that we need both a critical
examination of sovereignty and of the assumption that it pertains exclusively to the State.6 The impact
of globalization on sovereignty has been significant in creating operational and conceptual openings
for other actors and subjects.62 Feminist readings that personify the State leave sovereignty
unexamined; the State remains the exclusive subject for international law. This is not to deny the
importance of the types of critiques evident in this feminist scholarship. But when it comes to a
critique of international law, leaving out the issue of sovereignty and taking its confinement to the
nation-state as a given represents a fall-back on statism--the legitimacy of the State as the subject of
international law regardless of whether it is representative of the people's will, or more
fundamentally, rigorous in its adherence to the precepts of democratic representation.63 Why does it
matter that we develop a feminist critique of sovereignty today in the context of globalization? It
matters because globalization is creating new operational and formal openings for the participation of
non-State actors and subjects. Once the sovereign State is no longer viewed as the exclusive
representative of its population in the international arena, women and other non-State actors can
gain more representation in international law; contribute to the making of international law; and give
new meaning to older forms of international participation, such as women's longstanding work in
international peace efforts.' Beyond these issues of participation and representation is a question about
the implications of feminist theory for alternative conceptions of sovereignty.65
The state restricts and fails to protect the interests of women in the domestic and
international realms.
Blanchard 03 (Eric, PhD in Political Science from University of Southern California and American
Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellow, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development
of Feminist Security Theory”, http://people.reed.edu/~ahm/Courses/Reed-POL-240-2012S1_IP/Syllabus/EReadings/05.1/05.1.zFurther_Blanchard2003Gender.pdf, pg. 1297)
Like Tickner, many IR feminists problematize the state and raise questions as to its status as protector
of women. Peterson argues that, in addition to its relegation of sexual violence and its threat to the
private domestic realm, the state is implicated in the ways that women become “the objects of
masculinist social control not only through direct violence (murder, rape, battering, incest), but also
through ideological constructs, such as ‘women’s work’ and the cult of motherhood, that justify
structural violence—inadequate health care, sexual harassment, and sex-segregated wages, rights and
resources” (1992c, 46). However, while not denying the possibility of limited protection offered by the
state (Harrington 1992), FST contests the notion of protection—“the exchange of
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obedience/subordination for (promises of) security”—as a justification for state power (Peterson
1992c, 50). Peterson likens the state’s provision of security for women to a protection racket,
“implicated in the reproduction of hierarchies and in the structural violence against which they claim to
offer protection” (1992c, 51). In addition, Stiehm argues that the state typically denies women the
opportunity to be societal “protectors,” as-signing to them the role of “protected” despite the
predatory threat often posed by their ostensible guardians (1983a). Governmental attempts to
achieve total security versus an external threat can result in predictable oppression: “The problem is
that the potential victim is both more accessible and compliant than the marauder. Because the
protector is embarrassed and frustrated by his failure to protect, he restricts his protectee instead”
(373). By circumscribing the possibilities of the female deployment of legitimate force, the masculine
state effectively denies the development of what Stiehm calls a “defender” society, one “composed of
citizens equally liable to experience violence and equally responsible for exercising society’s violence”
(367).
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Security / Realism
The affirmative represents a masculinized attempt to impose security through control
– this entrenches gender hierarchies and prevents successful alternatives.
Tickner 1992
(J. Ann Tickner, Professor of International Relations at USC. Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. 1992, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/)
In previous chapters I have argued that traditional notions of national security are becoming
dysfunctional. The heavy emphasis on militarily defined security, common to the foreign policy
practices of contemporary states and to the historical traditions from which these practices draw their
inspiration, does not ensure, and sometimes may even decrease, the security of individuals, as well as
that of their natural environments. Many forms of insecurity in the contemporary world affect the
lives of individuals, including ethnic conflict, poverty, family violence, and environmental degradation;
all these types of insecurity can be linked to the international system, yet their elimination has not
been part of the way in which states have traditionally defined their national security goals. Previous
chapters have also called attention to the extent to which these various forms of military, economic, and
ecological insecurity are connected with unequal gender relations. The relationship between protectors
and protected depends on gender inequalities; a militarized version of security privileges masculine
characteristics and elevates men to the status of first-class citizens by virtue of their role as providers
of security. An analysis of economic insecurities suggests similar patterns of gender inequality in the
world economy, patterns that result in a larger share of the world's wealth and the benefits of economic
development accruing to men. The traditional association of women with nature, which places both in
a subordinate position to men, reflects and provides support for the instrumental and exploitative
attitude toward nature characteristic of the modern era, an attitude that contributes to current
ecological insecurities. This analysis has also suggested that attempts to alleviate these military,
economic, and ecological insecurities cannot be completely successful until the hierarchical social
relations, including gender relations, intrinsic to each of these domains are recognized and
substantially altered. In other words, the achievement of peace, economic justice, and ecological
sustainability is inseparable from overcoming social relations of domination and subordination;
genuine security requires not only the absence of war but also the elimination of unjust social
relations, including unequal gender relations
War and national security rhetoric promote an image of the state as necessary to
maximize profit – creates a form of exclusion that makes their impacts inevitable
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 48-52, MM]
Challenging the myth that wars are fought to protect women, children, and others stereotypically
viewed as “vulnerable,” feminists point to the high level of civilian casualties in contemporary wars.
Feminist scholarship has been particularly concerned with what goes on during wars, especially the
impact of war on women and civilians more generally. Whereas conventional security studies has
tended to look at causes and consequences of wars from a top-down, or structural, perspective,
feminists have generally taken a bottom-up approach, analyzing the impact of war at the microlevel.
By so doing, as well as adopting gender as a category of analysis, feminists believe they can tell us
something new about the causes of war that is missing from both conventional and critical
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perspectives. By crossing what many feminists believe to be mutually constitutive levels of analysis, we
get a better understanding of the interrelationship between all forms of violence and the extent to
which unjust social relations, including gender hierarchies, contribute to insecurity, broadly defined.
Claiming that the security-seeking behavior of states is described in gendered terms, feminists have
pointed to the masculinity of strategic discourse and how this may impact on understanding of and
prescriptions for security; it may also help to explain why women’s voices have so often been seen as
inauthentic in matters of national security. Feminists have examined how states legitimate their
security-seeking behavior through appeals to types of “hegemonic” masculinity. They are also
investigating the extent to which state and national identities, which can lead to conflict, are based on
gendered constructions. The valorization of war through its identification with a heroic kind of
masculinity depends on a feminized, devalued notion of peace seen as unattainable and unrealistic.
Since feminists believe that gender is a variable social construction, they claim that there is nothing
inevitable about these gendered distinctions; thus, their analyses often include the emancipatory
goal of postulating a different definition of security less dependent on binary and unequal gender
hierarchies. Casualties of War: Challenging the Myth of Protection Despite a widespread myth that
wars are fought, mostly by men, to protect “vulnerable” people—a category to which women and
children are generally assigned—women and children constitute a significant proportion of casualties
in recent wars. According to the United Nations’ Human Development Report, there has been a sharp
increase in the proportion of civilian casualties of war—from about 10 percent at the beginning of the
twentieth century to 90 percent at its close. Although the report does not break down these casualties
by sex, it claims that this increase makes women among the worst sufferers, even though they
constitute only 2 percent of the world’s regular army personnel.46 The 1994 report of the Save the
Children Fund reported that 1.5 million children were killed in wars and 4 million seriously injured by
bombs and land mines between 1984 and 1994.47 But there is another side to the changing pattern of
war, and women should not be seen only as victims; as civilian casualties increase, women’s
responsibilities rise. However, war makes it harder for women to fulfill their reproductive and care
giving tasks. For example, as mothers, family providers, and caregivers, women are particularly
penalized by economic sanctions associated with military conflict, such as the boycott put in place by
the United Nations against Iraq after the Gulf War of 1991. In working to overcome these difficulties,
women often acquire new roles and a greater degree of independence— independence that, frequently,
they must relinquish when the conflict is terminated. Women and children constitute about 75 percent
of the number of persons of concern to the United Nations Commission on Refugees (about 21.5 million
at the beginning of 1999). This population has increased dramatically since 1970 (when it was 3 million),
mainly due to military conflict, particularly ethnic conflicts.48 In these types of conflicts, men often
disappear, victims of state oppression or “ethnic cleansing,” or go into hiding, leaving women as the sole
family providers. Sometimes these women may find themselves on both sides of the conflict, due to
marriage and conflicting family ties. When women are forced into refugee camps, their vulnerability
increases. Distribution of resources in camps is conducted in consultation with male leaders, and
women are often left out of the distribution process. These gender-biased processes are based on
liberal assumptions that refugee men are both the sole wage earners in families and actors in the public
sphere.49 Feminists have also drawn attention to issues of wartime rape. In the Rwandan civil war, for
example, more than 250,000 women were raped; as a result they were stigmatized and cast out of their
communities, their children being labeled “devil’s children.” Not being classed as refugees, they have
also been ignored by international efforts.50 In northern Uganda, rebels abducted women to supply
sexual services to fighters, resulting in a spread of AIDS; frequently, after being raped, these women
have no other source of livelihood.51 As illustrated by the war in the former Yugoslavia, where it is
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estimated that twenty thousand to thirty-five thousand women were raped in Bosnia and Herzgovina,52
rape is not just an accident of war but often a systematic military strategy. In ethnic wars, rape is used as
a weapon to undermine the identity of entire communities. Cynthia Enloe has described social
structures in place around most U.S. Army overseas bases where women are often kidnapped and sold
into prostitution; the system of militarized sexual relations has required explicit U.S. policymaking.53
More than one million women have served as sex providers for U.S. military personnel since the
Korean War. These women, and others like them, are stigmatized by their own societies. In her study
of prostitution around U.S. military bases in South Korea in the 1970s, Katharine Moon shows how
these person-to-person relations were actually matters of security concern at the international level.
Cleanup of prostitution camps by the South Korean government, through policing of the sexual health
and work conduct of prostitutes, was part of its attempt to prevent withdrawal of U.S. troops that had
begun under the Nixon Doctrine of 1969. Thus, prostitution as it involved the military became a matter
of top-level U.S.-Korean security politics. Crossing levels of analysis, Moon demonstrates how the
weakness of the Korean state in terms of its wish to influence the U.S. government resulted in a
domestic policy of authoritarian, sexist control. In other words, national security translated into social
insecurity for these women .54 By looking at the effects of war on women, we can gain a better
understanding of the unequal gender relations that sustain military activities. When we reveal social
practices that support war and that are variable across societies, we find that war is a cultural
construction that depends on myths of protection; it is not inevitable, as realists suggest. The evidence
we now have about women in conflict situations severely strains the protection myth; yet, such myths
have been important in upholding the legitimacy of war and the impossibility of peace. A deeper look
into these gendered constructions can help us to understand not only some of the causes of war but
how certain ways of thinking about security have been legitimized at the expense of others, both in
the discipline of IR and in political practice. National Security: A Gendered Discourse: Donna Haraway
claims that all scientific theories are embedded in particular kinds of stories, or what she terms “fictions
of science.”55 IR feminists, like some other critical theorists, particularly those concerned with
genealogy, have examined the stories on which realism and neorealism base their prescriptions for
states’ national-security behavior, looking for evidence of gender bias. Feminist reanalysis of the socalled “creation myths” of international relations, on which realist assumptions about states’ behavior
are built, reveals stories built on male representations of how individuals function in society. The
parable of man’s amoral, self-interested behavior in the state of nature, made necessary by the lack of
restraint on the behavior of others, is taken by realists to be a universal model for explaining states’
behavior in the international system. But, as Rebecca Grant asserts, this is a male, rather than a
universal, model : were life to go on in the state of nature for more than one generation, other
activities such as childbirth and child rearing, typically associated with women, must also have taken
place. Grant also claims that Rousseau’s stag hunt, which realists have used to explain the security
dilemma, ignores the deeper social relations in which the activities of the hunters are embedded. When
women are absent from these foundational myths, a source of gender bias is created that extends into
international-relations theory.56 Feminists are also questioning the use of more scientifically based
rational-choice theory, based on the instrumentally rational behavior of individuals in the marketplace
that neorealists have used to explain states’ security-seeking behavior. According to this model, states
are unproblematically assumed to be instrumental profit maximizers pursuing power and autonomy in
an anarchic international system. Where international cooperation exists, it is explained not in terms of
community but, rather, in terms of enlightened self-interest. Feminists suggest that rational-choice
theory is based on a partial representation of human behavior that, since women in the West have
historically been confined to reproductive activities, has been more typical of certain men.57
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Characteristics such as self-help, autonomy, and power maximizing that are prescribed by realists as
security-enhancing behavior are very similar to the hegemonic, masculine-gendered characteristics
described in chapter 1. The instrumentally competitive behavior of states, which results in power
balancing, is similar to equilibrium theory, or the market behavior of rational-economic man.
Therefore, it tends to privilege certain types of behaviors over others. While states do indeed behave in
these ways, these models offer us only a partial understanding of their behavior. As other IR scholars,
too, have pointed out, states engage in cooperative as well as conflictual behavior; privileging these
masculinist models tends to delegitimate other ways of behaving and make them appear less
“realistic.”
The politics of security and warfighting practices are explicitly gendered
Byron & Thorburn 98 (Jessica Byron, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus,
Kingston, Jamaica, PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland, Diana Thorburn, lecturer in
International Relations in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Ph.D. in International Relations and
International Economics from Johns Hopkins University, “Gender and International Relations: A Global Perspective and Issues for the
Caribbean”, Feminist Review, No. 59, Summer 1998, pp 211-232)
The themes of conflict and security have attracted sustained scrutiny from feminist scholars because of their
centrality to IR theory and practice, and because of their particularly strong masculine bias. Many, including Rebecca
Grant, have identified national security structures and the attendant ways of thinking as the sources of
much of the gender bias in inter- national relations theory as a whole (Grant 1991). She argues that the initial gendered
separation of the public and private spheres in the organization of state and society produced an exclusively male concept of citizenship. Men
were given the military role of defenders of the state, thereby acquiring a privileged and active status
in national life. Women were invisible, did not have access to the state machinery and did not
participate in national decision making. Domestic concerns played little part in shaping 'the national
interest'. Marysia Zalewski (199S) and Cynthia Enloe (1993) point out the extent to which beliefs about gender differences have been
deliberately constructed in the security sphere. The idea of the masculinity of war and the image of the macho
soldier have reinforced the patriarchal order. The traditional exclusion of women from armed combat
was a mechanism designed not primarily to protect them, but to protect male privilege (Zalewski, 199S).
Beliefs and myths about masculinity and femininity act on their own, or are consciously manipulated
by the authorities, in the process of escalating or terminating armed conflict. The analytical lens of gender is a
perspective which has attracted considerable interest during the last five years as a result of the gender dimensions of contemporary
communal violence and of political, economic and social change in the post-Cold War world. Developments in Eastern Europe and elsewhere
have underlined the need to uncover deep-seated beliefs about gender roles and identities, and to investigate their functions in conflict and
immediate post-conflict situations. Recent research has focused on three important themes: (i) in
many post-Cold War societies
in transition, there has been a rise of conservative political forces and the reassertion of women's
traditional roles within the family. State policies excluding women from political activity,
employment and from access to legal abortion facilities are being justified on the basis of essentialist
doc- trines that reintroduce gender biases and inequalities in a new era (Molyneux, in Grant and Newland, 1991;
Zalewski, 1995); (ii) in situations of ethnic conflict, women often find themselves caught between the
defence of their individual reproductive rights and pro-nationalist policies aimed at the ethnic and
cultural survival of the community (Bracewell, 1996; Yuval Davis, 1996); (iii) rape and other forms of sexual
violence against women have become integral parts of military strategy in the twentieth century.
Particularly in communal conflicts, women's status as national and community icons causes them to
be explicitly targeted for demoralization through such forms of torture. (Seifert, 1996)
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Realist international relations are patriarchal and depend on masculine principles to
conduct international politics.
Blanchard 03 (Eric, PhD in Political Science from University of Southern California and American
Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellow, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development
of Feminist Security Theory”, http://people.reed.edu/~ahm/Courses/Reed-POL-240-2012S1_IP/Syllabus/EReadings/05.1/05.1.zFurther_Blanchard2003Gender.pdf, pg. 1293)
Feminists in IR argue that realism, dominated by elite, white, male practitioners, is a patriarchal
discourse that renders women invisible from the high politics of IR even as it depends on women’s
subjugation as a “‘domesticated’ figure whose ‘feminine’ sensibilities are both at odds with and
inconsequential to the harsh ‘realities’ of the public world of men and states” (Runyan and Peterson
1991, 68–69). Feminists in IR explain the exclusion of women from foreign policy decision making by
pointing to the “extent to which international politics is such a thoroughly masculinized sphere of
activity that women’s voices are considered inauthentic” (Tickner 1992, 4). Women’s traditional
exclusion from the military and continuing lack of access to political power at times presents women
with a “catch-22” situation. For example, the importance of a candidate’s military service as a
qualification for government office in U.S. political campaigns puts women, who cannot appeal to this
experience, at a disadvantage in obtaining the elite status of national office and thus the ability to affect
defense and security policies (Tobias 1990; cf. Elshtain 2000, 445). However, the FST critique is not
limited to strategies for getting more women access to corridors of power; feminists also direct our
attention to the gendered structure of IR theory. As the title of a classic IR text indicates, the study of
international politics has been concerned first and foremost with Man, the State, and War (Waltz
1959). In this book, neorealist Kenneth Waltz turns to the canons of political philosophy for an
explanation of the causes of war by asking whether wars are caused by human nature, by the internal
structure of states, or by the international system. An important component of the study of IR is a selfpositioning in the tradition of Western political theory—tracing an intellectual lineage to Machiavelli and
Hobbes—particularly as it concerns the state. Feminist analysis of this pedigree shows that the feminine
has long served as a symbolic threat to militarized Western conceptualizations of political community,
from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century; Aeschylus’s Furies and Machiavelli’s Fortuna are but
two examples (Harstock 1983). Rebecca Grant (1991) argues that a gender bias in IR, transmitted
unproblematically from Western political thought to the study of IR, results in the question of gender
being taken as irrelevant. For Grant, IR’s interpretation of Hobbes allows “no room for the question of
how gender relations affect the transition out of the brutish state of nature and into society,” while
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous stag hunt, often invoked as a parable of the problems of security,
ignores the familial relations that control the hunter’s defection from the hunting circle (10–15). Taking
men as the sole political actors and citizens, the political theory borrowed by IR postulates a
domestic/international divide premised on the private/public distinction that relegates women to a
space outside politics (9).
The more spending on national security, the greater the misogynistic oppression—
each dollar spent on national security trades off with women’s physical (domestic)
security
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 62-63, MM]
Questioning the role of states as adequate security providers, but being aware of their continuing
importance as the political category within which security is defined by policymakers and scholars alike,
leads feminists to analyze power and military capabilities differently from conventional security
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studies. Rather than seeing military capability as an assurance against outside threats to the state,
militaries are seen as frequently antithetical to individuals’ (particularly women’s) security—as winners
in the competition for resources, as definers of an ideal type of militarized citizenship, usually denied
to women,90 and as legitimators of a kind of social order that can sometimes even valorize state
violence. Simona Sharoni has suggested that, in states torn by conflict, the more government is
preoccupied with national security, the less its citizens, especially women, experience physical
security. 91 State violence is a particular problem in certain states, but it must also be emphasized that
many states, although formally at peace, sustain huge military budgets at the same time as social
spending is being cut; this, too, can be a form of violence. These feminist definitions of security grow
out of the centrality of social relations, particularly gender relations, for feminist theorizing. Feminists
claim that structural inequalities, which are central contributors to the insecurity of individuals, are
built into the historical legacy of the modern state and the international system of which it is a part.
Calling into question realist boundaries between anarchy and danger on the outside and order and
security on the inside, feminists point out that state-centric and structural analyses miss the
interrelation of insecurity across levels of analysis. Since “women’s space” inside households has also
been beyond the reach of law in most states, feminists are often quite suspicious of boundaries that
mark states as security providers. Although, in nationalist ideologies, family metaphors are used to
evoke a safe space or sense of belonging, families are not always considered a safe space for women. In
most societies, families, frequently beyond the reach of law, have too often been the site of
unsanctioned violence against women and children.92 Violence, therefore, runs across levels of analysis.
While these types of issues have not normally been considered within the subject matter of security
studies, feminists are beginning to show how all of these issues and levels are interrelated.
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Protection Link
Protection rhetoric links to the K – descriptions of US involvement as necessary for the
safety of its citizens furthers exclusion
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 56-57, MM]
National identities are often used by domestic elites to promote state or group interests and hide race
and class divisions. Defining moments in collective historical memories are frequently wars of national
liberation, great victories in battles against external enemies, or the glories of former imperialist
expansion. Flags and national anthems are often associated with war. Scholars who study nationalism
have emphasized the importance of warfare for the creation of a sense of national community. Not only
does war mobilize the national consciousness, it also provides the myths and memories that create a
sense of national identity, an identity for which people have been willing to die and kill.65 As Jean
Elshtain asserts, societies are, in some sense, the “sum total” of their war stories.66 War stories are
often used to gain a society’s support for a war; frequently, these stories rely on the portrayal of a
certain kind of masculinity associated with heroism and strength. These portrayals can be racialized as
well as gendered; as Susan Jeffords notes, all the heroes in Hollywood’s 1980s Vietnam War and actionadventure films were white men.67 Rarely do war stories include stories about women. Gendering
War: The association between masculinity and war has been central to feminist investigations. While the
manliness of war is rarely denied, militaries must work hard to turn men into soldiers, using misogynist
training that is thought necessary to teach men to fight. Importantly, such training depends on the
denigration of anything that could be considered feminine; to act like a soldier is not to be “womanly.”
“Military manhood,” or a type of heroic masculinity that goes back to the Greeks, attracts recruits and
maintains selfesteem in institutions where subservience and obedience are the norm.68 Another image
of a soldier is a just warrior, self-sacrificially protecting women, children, and other vulnerable people.
The notion that (young) males fight wars to protect vulnerable groups, such as women and children,
who cannot be expected to protect themselves, has been an important motivator for the recruitment of
military forces. The concept of the “protected” is essential to the legitimation of violence ; it has been
an important myth that has sustained support for war and its legitimation for both women and men.
In wartime, the heroic, just warrior is sometimes contrasted with a malignant, often racialized,
masculinity attributed to the enemy that serves as further justification for protection.69 These
images of the masculinities of war depend on rendering women invisible. Yet women have been part
of armies—as cooks, laundresses, and nurses—throughout history. Since the late nineteenth century,
military nursing has involved women serving close to the front lines; such women have been vital to war
efforts, although stories about their activities are rarely told, perhaps because they speak of death,
injury, and vulnerability, rather than heroism.70 More recently, in certain states, women are beginning
to be incorporated into the armed forces.
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Terrorism
The discourse of the War on Terror necessarily portrays women as victims, needing
heroic men to save them
Johnstone 9 (Rachael, Law @ U of Akureyri Iceland, Chicago-Kent Journal of International and
Comparative Law, p. 44, www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/Feminist%20Theory%20and%20Gender%20
Studies%20Archive.pdf)
Finally, the discourse of the “War on Terror” itself revealed a perceived need for the state to define its
masculinity in the aftermath of attack. This required painting men as heroes and women as
victims.211 Chinkin and Charlesworth described the media responses in the immediate aftermath in which women were featured
as heavenly rewards for terrorists or as victims of the attack, preferably widows of murdered men, rather than
the women who themselves worked daily in the twin towers or in the rescue services.212 Women in
the armed services and firefighting teams were conspicuous by their invisibility.213 Women in Afghanistan
are depicted as victims of a brutal Taliban, requiring rescue by heroic (Western) men – though not political
participation.214 The suffering women endure under the airpower of those same Western forces and the hardship encountered as essential
services are put beyond their use are unfortunate “collateral damage” — a sacrifice for their greater long-term good.215 Susan Faludi’s 2007
investigative retrospect of the media in the aftermath of 9/11 provides thorough confirmation of the Australians’ early impressions.216 In
such times, a
feminist perspective of the state that seeks women’s empowerment and equal
participation in the public sphere is unlikely to find favor.
The War on Terror has demoted women to being the victims
Pettman 4 (Jan Jindy, Director of Women’s Studies @ ANU, Brown Journal of World Affairs 10(2),
Winter/Spring 2004, p. 88)
In an early response to this crisis, Ann Tickner asked, “What can a feminist analysis add to our
understanding of 9/11 and its aftermath?”20 She demonstrated that femi- nists do have some very
important things to say regarding the gender of identity, vio- lence, and war, and specifically
developed these insights in relation to 9/11 and Af- ghanistan. Likewise Hilary Charlesworth and
Christine Chinin21 began their com- mentary with the claim that ‘concepts of sex and gender provide a
valuable perspective on these devastating actions’.22 Both articles noted the apparent disappearance
of women in the violence and what followed, as men—hijackers, rescuers, national security offic- ers,
and media commentators—filled our screens and newspapers.23 “September 11 and its repercussions
have appeared, then, to be all about men attacking, saving lives, and responding through further
attack,” which seems normal.24 Substitute 19 women hijackers, commentators, and leaders, and a
different scenario develops.25 So too women, let alone feminists, were not seen as authorities having
anything to add to the analysis. For example, according to the Guardian survey of almost 50 opinion
pieces in the New York Times in the first six weeks after the attack, only two were by women.26 It is
quite wrong however to suggest that gender had disappeared or even that women were not present.
Women appeared in ways long embedded in the gendered war story. They appeared alongside men
as victims and relatives of victims of 9/11.
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Proliferation
Proliferation discourse constructs some WMD’s as unproblematic producing a
hierarchy of state power
Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, & Ruddick, taught
philosophy, peace studies, and feminist theory at the New School University, 03 (Carol & Sara, ‘A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction’, Boston Consortium on Gender, Security,
and Human Rights, www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/director.htm LRP)
“Proliferation, ” as used in Western political discourse, does not simply refer to the “multiplication” of
weapons of mass destruction on the planet. Rather, it constructs some WMD as a problem, and others
as unproblematic. It does so by assuming pre-existing, legitimate possessors of the weapons,
implicitly not only entitled to those weapons, but to “modernize” and develop new “generations” of
them as well. The “problematic” WMD are only those that “spread” into the arsenals of other,
formerly non-possessor states. This is presumably the basis for the “licit/illicit” distinction in the
question; it does not refer to the nature of the weapons themselves, nor even to the purposes for
which they are intended – only, in the case of nuclear weapons, to who the possessor is, where
“licitness” is based on the treaty-enshrined “we got there first.” Thus, use of the term “proliferation”
tends to locate the person who uses it within a possessor state, and aligns him or her with the political
stance favoring the hierarchy of state power enshrined in the current distribution of WMD. The
framing of Question Four. “... is it proper to deny [WMD] possession to others for the same purposes?”,
seems similarly based in a possessor state perspective, as it is presumably the possessor states who
must decide whether it is proper to deny possession to others.
The aff draws on and evokes gender imagery. Proliferation rhetoric Orientalizes and
feminizes the un-ruly other.
Cohn, Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, & Ruddick, taught
philosophy, peace studies, and feminist theory at the New School University, 03 (Carol & Sara, ‘A
Feminist Ethical Perspective on Weapons of Mass Destruction’, Boston Consortium on Gender, Security,
and Human Rights, www.genderandsecurity.umb.edu/director.htm LRP)
Here, we join others in noting that the language in which the case against “proliferation” is made is
ethno-racist and contemptuous. Generally, in Western proliferation discourse as a whole, a distinction
is drawn between “the ‘Self’(seen as responsible) vs the non-Western Unruly Other.”36 The US
represents itself as a rational actor, while representing the Unruly Other as emotional, unpredictable,
irrational, immature, misbehaving. Not only does this draw on and reconstruct an Orientalist
portrayal of third world actors 37; it does so through the medium of gendered terminology. By
drawing the relations between possessors and non-possessors in gendered terms – the prudential,
rational, advanced, mature, restrained, technologically- and bureaucratically- competent (and thus
“masculine”) Self, versus the emotional, irrational, unpredictable, uncontrolled, immature, primitive,
undisciplined, technologically-incompetent (and thus “feminine”) Unruly Other – the discourse
naturalizes and legitimates the Self/possessor states having weapons which the Other does not. By
drawing on and evoking gendered imagery and resonances, the discourse naturalizes the idea that
“We” / the US / the responsible father must protect, must control and limit “her,” the emotional, outof-control state, for her own good, as well as for ours.
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Economics – Generic
International economic analysis excludes the gendered nature of domestic labor—the
main analytical tools for understanding the international economy are differences
which accrue to race, ethnicity, and class, because these are the axes which seem to
most obviously effect the functioning of states.
Byron & Thorburn 98 (Jessica Byron, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus,
Kingston, Jamaica, PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland, Diana Thorburn, lecturer in
International Relations in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Ph.D. in International Relations and
International Economics from Johns Hopkins University, “Gender and International Relations: A Global Perspective and Issues for the
Caribbean”, Feminist Review, No. 59, Summer 1998, pp 211-232)
The sub-discipline of International Political Economy (IPE) maintains a consistent critique of
mainstream International Relations for its insufficient attention to the impact of international
processes on people’s lives. Ironically, while IPE identifies class, race and ethnicity as driving forces
behind international relations, gender has not yet been included in a major way. Caribbean IPE scholars have
recognized the unequal and inequitable international division of labours but its gendered dimensions have largely escaped attention save by
Cecilia Green on Caribbean women and global restructuring (1994). So
far it has been feminist theorists who have
identified the capitalist system as based on and maintained by the subordination of women and their
waged and unwaged labour. Maria Mies has given one of the first such analyses in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
(1986). Mies's thesis posits that the existing international division of labour is built on the exploitation of
women and colonized peoples, towards the maintenance of the capitalist patriarchal system which constitutes the world economy (Mies,
1986). Thus, while there exists an international division of labour that relegates the peripheral groups in peripheral countries (as well as the
that division of labour is fundamentally gendered so that
women are, so to speak, doubly oppressed in the historical and contemporary machinations of the global capitalist economy.
Into this framework Cecilia Green puts forward a detailed account and analysis of how these forces were played out in the Caribbean. Green
traces women's relative independence during slavery, where women slaves were seen purely as
labour, and subsequent parallel patterns of autonomy and dependence on male partners after
abolition and emancipation, through to ¶migration and farming patterns which are visible today in the
peripheral groups in core countries) to subordinate positions,
lives of Caribbean women and the gender system presently at work. Green aptly DD explicates the gendered nature of the contemporary
phase of global , restructuring: As the globalization of high-technology production restructures technology, $ investment, employment, and
labor, it
shifts certain types of low-technology z jobs in electronics and garment assembly activities to the
tend to be concentrated in these jobs because capital has
defined them as women's work. This has been happening at the same time as traditional exports have
contracted, thereby putting many men out of work, combined with the impact of structural
adjustment programs on wages and employment, this process exacerbates problems for women in
the Caribbean especially heads of households who must now support their families and a growing
number of unemployed males
Caribbean and else- w where in the Third World. Women
International economy is gendered
Sassen-96 (Saskia, Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Columbia, “Toward a Feminist
Analytics of the Global Economy,” 4 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 7 1996-1997)
The master images in the currently dominant account about economic globalization in media and policy
circles, as well as in much economic analysis, emphasize hypermobility, global communications, and
the neutralization of place and distance. Key concepts in that account--globalization, information
economy, and telematics--all suggest that place no longer matters and that the only type of worker
that matters is the highly educated professional. This account privileges the capability for global
transmission over the material infrastructure that makes transmission possible; information outputs
over the workers producing those outputs, from specialists to secretaries; and the new transnational
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corporate culture over the multiplicity of work cultures, including immigrant cultures, within which many
of the "other" jobs of the global information economy take place. In brief, the dominant narrative
concerns itself with the upper circuits of capital, not the lower ones; and particularly with the
hypermobility of capital rather than place-bound capital. Massive trends toward the spatial dispersal of
economic activities at the metropolitan, national, and global level represent only half of what is
happening. Alongside the well-documented spatial dispersal of economic activities, new forms of
territorial centralization of top-level management and control operations have appeared. National and
global markets, as well as globally integrated operations, require central places where the work of
globalization gets done. Further, information industries require a vast physical infrastructure containing
strategic nodes with hyperconcentration of facilities. Finally, even the most advanced information
industries have a production process. Once this production process is brought into the analysis, we see
that secretaries are part of it, and so are the cleaners of the buildings where the professionals do their
work. An economic configuration very different from that suggested by the concept information
economy emerges. We recover the material conditions, production sites, and place-boundedness that
are also part of globalization and the information economy. There is a tendency in the mainstream
account to take the existence of a global economic system as a given, a function of the power of
transnational corporations and global communications. But the capabilities for global operation,
coordination, and control contained in the new information technologies and in the power of
transnational corporations need to be produced. By focusing on the production of these capabilities we
add a neglected dimension to the familiar issue of the power of large corporations and the new
technologies. The emphasis shifts to the practices that constitute what we call economic globalization
and global control: the work of producing and reproducing the organization and management of a global
production system and a global marketplace for finance, both under conditions of economic
concentration. A focus on practices draws the categories of place and work process into the analysis of
economic globalization. These are two categories easily overlooked in accounts centered on the
hypermobility of capital and the power of transnationals. Developing categories such as place and
production process does not negate the importance of hypermobility and power. Rather, it brings to the
fore the fact that many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile
and are, indeed, deeply embedded in place, notably places such as global cities and export processing
zones. Global processes are structured by local constraints, including the composition of the
workforce, work cultures, and political cultures, and other processes within nation-states. Further, by
emphasizing the fact that global processes are at least partly embedded in national territories, such a
focus introduces new variables in current conceptions about economic globalization and the shrinking
regulatory role of the State. That is to say, the space economy for major new transnational economic
processes diverges in significant ways from the duality global/national presupposed in much analysis of
the global economy. The duality "national versus global" suggests two mutually exclusive spaces-- where
one begins the other ends. Nation-states play a role in the implementation of global economic systems,
a role that can assume different forms depending on development levels, political culture, and mode of
articulation with global processes.'9 Reintroducing the State in analyses of globalization creates a
conceptual opening for an examination of how this transformed State, specifically the growing power of
certain agencies, articulates the gender question. One instantiation of this reconfigured State is the
ascendance of Treasury and the decline of departments dealing with the social fund, from housing to
health and welfare.'0 Recapturing the geography of places involved in globalization allows us to
recapture people, workers, communities, and more specifically, the many different work cultures, apart
from the corporate culture, involved in the work of globalization.2 The global city can be seen as one
strategic research site for the study of these processes. This type of city is a structure that contributes to
the differentiation of culture and of the many forms of localization of global processes.22 One of the
central concerns in my work has been to look at cities as production sites for the leading information
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industries of our time and to recover the infrastructure of activities, firms, and jobs necessary to run the
advanced corporate economy.' These industries are typically conceptualized in terms of the
hypermobility of their outputs and the high levels of expertise of their professionals rather than in terms
of the production process involved and the requisite infrastructure of facilities and non-expert jobs that
are also part of these industries. A detailed analysis of service-based urban economies shows that
there is considerable articulation of firms, sectors, and workers who may appear as though they have
little connection to an urban economy dominated by finance and specialized services, but in fact fulfill
a series of functions that are an integral part of that economy. They do so, however, under conditions
of sharp social, earnings, and, often, sex and racial/ethnic segmentation.' In the day-to-day work of
the leading services complex dominated by finance, a large share of the jobs involved are low pay
and manual, many held by women and immigrants . Although these types of workers and jobs are
never represented as part of the global economy, they are in fact part of the infrastructure of jobs
involved in running and implementing the global economic system, including such an advanced form
of it as international finance.25 The top end of the corporate economy-the corporate towers that
project engineering expertise, precision, "techne"--is far easier to mark as necessary for an advanced
economic system than are truckers and other industrial service workers, even though these are a
necessary ingredient.26 We see here at work a dynamic of valorization that has sharply increased the
distance between the devalorized and the valorized, indeed overvalorized, sectors of the economy.
Some of the developments described above can be read as constituting a new geography of centrality
and marginality. This new geography partly reproduces existing inequalities but also is the outcome of a
dynamic specific to current modes of economic growth. It assumes many forms and operates in many
arenas, from the distribution of telecommunications facilities to the structure of the economy and of
employment. Global cities accumulate immense concentrations of economic power while cities that
were once major manufacturing centers suffer inordinate declines; the downtowns of cities and business
centers in metropolitan areas receive massive investments in real estate and telecommunications while
low-income urban and metropolitan areas are starved for resources. Highly educated workers in the
corporate sector see their incomes rise to unusually high levels while low- or medium-skilled workers see
their incomes sink. Financial services produce superprofits while industrial services barely survive. This is
not a fixed geography; some of its components are quite volatile and some of its spaces are contested.
Yet, there are also strong forces contributing to reproduce these configurations, though not necessarily
all elements within them."'
Neoliberal “market reforms” lead to increases in rape, domestic violence, and
prostitution
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
The destabilisation of economic patterns in society by macro-economic policies that facilitate a states'
global integration is associated with growing inequalities and increasing levels of violence against
women in several regions, including Latin America, Africa and Asia.48 The market transitions in Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union led to widespread increases in poverty, unemployment, hardship,
income inequality, stress and violence against women. These factors also indirectly raised women's
vulnerability by encouraging more risk-taking behaviour, more alcohol and drug abuse, the breakdown
of social support networks, and the economic dependence of women on their partners.49 Some have
viewed Eastern Europe and Central Asia as 'test regions' for judging the impact of neoliberal policies.
Rather than revealing positive effects of market reform, almost all the countries in these regions have
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exhibited regressions in women's economic and social status.s0 The biggest regression has been in
Eastern Europe according to Social Watch's 2008 Gender Equity Index. As well as increases in rape and
domestic violence, this region has seen hundreds of thousands of young women trafficked for
prostitution and other indentured labour each year due to the loss of economic opportunities
emanating from liberalisation. Women are often the hardest hit by economic transition, financial crises
and rising unemployment. 'Economic and political insecurity provoke private and public backlash against
women's rights that may be expressed through violence and articulated in the form of defending
cultures and traditions'.5 Widespread discrimination against girls and women in education,
employment and business, and the lack of a state social safety net can mean they are not protected
from violence when economies rapidly expand and contract. Export-oriented development in East
Asia has had a detrimental impact on women and girls due to patriarchal family-firm structures and
the lesser value attributed to women's paid and unpaid labour. There is considerable evidence that
economic growth in East Asian countries such as Korea, Taiwan, China and Hong Kong was accelerated
by increasing women's employment, while at the same time widening gender wage gaps in the labour
market.52 When the Asian Financial Crisis hit in 1997-1998, the impact on women and girls in the region
was disproportionate as early indications of the impact of the 2008 financial crisis also suggest. Girls
were removed from school to help at home or they were forced to seek work in the sex sector to
support household incomes as a result of cutbacks in public service jobs and salaries. 53 In some East
Asian countries women's paid labour intensified while in others, notably South Korea, their labour
participation shrunk. The resulting increased financial burdens strained intra-household relationships,
boosted suicides, family violence and abandonment. 5 4
The global economy creates a need for domestic labor of immigrant women, which
causes an increase in “maid trade” and sex trafficking
Mohanty 2003 [Chandra Talpade. professor of Women's and Gender Studies, "'Under Western Eyes'
Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles." Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture &
Society 28.2 (2003): 499.]
Women workers of particular caste/class, race, and economic status are necessary to the operation of
the capitalist global economy. Women are not only the preferred candidates for particular jobs, but
particular kinds of women—poor, Third and Two-Thirds World, working-class, and immigrant/migrant
women—are the preferred workers in these global, “flexible” temporary job markets. The
documented increase in the migration of poor , One-Third/Two-Thirds World women in search of
labor across national borders has led to a rise in the international “maid trade” (Parren ̃as 2001) and
in international sex trafficking and tourism.30 Many global cities now require and completely depend
on the service and domestic labor of immigrant and migrant women. The proliferation of structural
one of the smartest, most accessible, and complex analyses of the color, class, and gender of
globalization. 29 The literature on gender and globalization is vast, and I do not pretend to review it in
any comprehensive way. I draw on three particular texts to critically summarize what I consider to be
the most useful and provocative analyses of this area: Eisenstein 1998; Marchand and Runyan 2000; and
Basu et al. 2001. 30 See essays in Kempadoo and Doezema 1999 and Puar 2001. 526 ! Mohanty
adjustment policies around the world has reprivatized women’s labor by shifting the responsibility for
social welfare from the state to the household and to women located there. The rise of religious
fundamentalisms in conjunction with conservative nationalisms, which are also in part reactions to
global capital and its cultural demands, has led to the policing of women’s bodies in the streets and in
the workplaces. Global capital also reaffirms the color line in its newly articulated class structure evident
in the prisons in the One-Third World. The effects of globalization and deindustrialization on the prison
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industry in the One- Third World leads to a related policing of the bodies of poor, One-Third/ TwoThirds World, immigrant, and migrant women behind the concrete spaces and bars of privatized
prisons. Angela Davis and Gina Dent (2001) argue that the political economy of U.S. prisons, and the
punishment industry in the West/North, brings the intersection of gender, race, colonialism, and
capitalism into sharp focus. Just as the factories and work- places of global corporations seek and
discipline the labor of poor, Third World/South, immigrant/migrant women, the prisons of Europe and
the United States incarcerate disproportionately large numbers of women of color, immigrants, and
noncitizens of African, Asian, and Latin American descent.
Current neoliberal economies gender labor and poverty
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
A feminist political economy method is a necessary corrective to feminist political/legal theory, UN
approaches to gender-based violence and feminist security studies that do not fully comprehend the
global political economic structures that both condition and heighten women's vulnerability to
violence. In general, political economy as a method analyses political and economic power as part of
the same authority structure. All forms of power - including the use of violence - are understood as
having a material basis, and often founded on material relations of inequality. The method directs us
to investigate the interconnections between the economic, social and political realms. Such
investigations reveal that power operates not only through direct coercion but also through the
structured relations of production and reproduction that govern the distribution and use of resources,
benefits, privileges and authority within the home and transnational society at large.'8 Political
economic processes interact with and re-configure the institutional and ideological formations of
society where gender identities and relations are shaped. As Bina Agarwal states:
Those who own and/or control wealth-generating property can directly or indirectly control the
principal institutions that shape ideology, such as educational and religious establishments and the
media.... These can shape views in either gender-progressive or gender-retrogressive directions.' 9
Feminist political economy highlights the masculine nature of the integrated political-economic
authority structure. The three elements of a feminist political economy method summarised above can
be employed to analyse the material situation of women and men particularly with respect to their
unequal access to productive resources, toward a more comprehensive explanation of the prevalence of
different forms of violence against women in wide-ranging global contexts. The first element is the
gendered public-private sphere division of labour, which is supported by gender ideologies that hold
women primarily responsible for unremunerated, and often invisible unpaid work in the family or
'private' sphere. Caring professions in the 'public' labour market akin to the unpaid care work women
traditionally do in the home are devalued as a result of this gender structure.20 The internationalisation
of reproductive work has extended this division of labour to the transnational realm as women from
poorer, developing countries migrate to provide care services for families in wealthier countries. In a
mutually constitutive way, the strict division of roles in the domestic sphere constrains women's public
participation and their access to economic opportunities in the market, in turn creating inequalities in
household bargaining power between men and women and entrapping women into potentially violent
environments at home and at work. Some women, especially those in developed countries, avoid
patriarchal, and potentially violent, situations in the family/private sphere by contracting out care
work to poor women, including migrant women from the global South. The second element
highlighted by a feminist political economy method is the contemporary global, macroeconomic
environment. Capitalist competition encourages firms to seek cheap sources of labour and
deregulated investment conditions that maximise profits locally and transnationally. In this context,
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the relocation of industries has disrupted local economies and dramatically changed labour markets,
increasing a poorly regulated economy of low pay and insecure jobs, and attracting women from
developed and developing societies into wage employment on a scale unseen before. While the
neoliberal policy environment has led to the expansion of women's employment, it has also led to the
intensification of their work-load in the market and at home, and to the 'feminisation of poverty'
especially among unskilled and marginalised poor women in developing countries who lack access to
productive resources or public services. Such poverty, marginalisation and lack of protective
mechanisms make women easy targets for abuse and undermine the prospects for their
empowerment.21 These conditions also disempower many men who may react to the loss of
employment and economic opportunities by reasserting their power over women through violence.
The third element of a feminist political economy method relates to the gendered dimensions of war
and peace, which are intimately connected to both private patriarchy and the differential gender
impacts of economic globalisation. Violent conflict, which often results from struggles to control power
and productive resources, normalises violence and spreads it throughout the societies involved. State
and group-sanctioned violence frequently celebrate masculine aggression and perpetuate impunity
with regard to men's violence against women, viewing this violence, inter alia, as the 'spoils of war'. A
feminist political economy approach implies that stability without justice is not possible. The
prioritisation of national security and electoral machinery by governments over the social and
economic security of citizens in many post-conflict situations is usually destabilising in the long run.
Insofar as women are unable to gain access to physical security, social services, justice and economic
opportunities, their particular vulnerability to violence continues in peace time. The remainder of this
article illustrates broadly how such a feminist political economy method might be used to analyse
violence against women in range of contexts, including those conflict and post- conflict settings
conventionally examined by international relations and law scholars.
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Economics – Globalization
Globalization harms women, especially in the Third World, in the context of global
capital
Mohanty 2003 [Chandra Talpade. professor of Women's and Gender Studies, "'Under Western Eyes'
Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles." Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture &
Society 28.2 (2003): 499.]
Shiva essentially offers a critique of the global privatization of indigenous knowledges. This is a story
about the rise of transnational institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank, and the International
Monetary Fund, of banking and financial institutions and cross-national governing bodies like the MAI
(Multinational Agreement on Investments). The effects of these governing bodies on poor people
around the world have been devastating. In fundamental ways, it is girls and women around the
world, especially in the Third World/South, that bear the brunt of globalization . Poor women and
girls are the hardest hit by the degradation of environmental conditions, wars, famines, privatization
of services and deregulation of governments, the dismantling of welfare states, the restructuring of
paid and unpaid work, increasing surveillance and incarceration in prisons, and so on. And this is why a
feminism without and beyond borders is necessary to address the injustices of global capitalism.
Women and girls are still 70 percent of the world’s poor and the majority of the world’s refugees.
Girls and women comprise almost 80 percent of displaced persons of the Third World/South in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America. Women do two-thirds of the world’s work and earn less than one-tenth of its
income. Women own less than one-hundredth of the world’s property, while they are the hardest hit
by the effects of war, domestic violence, and religious persecution. Feminist political theorist Zillah
Eisenstein states that global capital in racialized and sexualized guise destroys the public spaces of
democracy and quietly sucks power out of the once social/public spaces of nation-states. Corporate
capitalism has redefined citizens as consumers—and global markets replace the commitments to
economic, sexual, and racial equality (Eisenstein 1998, esp. chap. 5). It is especially on the bodies and
lives of women and girls from the Third World/South—the Two-Thirds World—that global capitalism
writes its script, and it is by paying attention to and theorizing the experiences of these communities of
women and girls that we demystify capitalism as a system of debilitating sexism and racism and envision
anticapitalist resistance. Thus any analysis of the effects of globalization needs to centralize the
experiences and struggles of these particular communities of women and girls.
Their IR methodology marginalizes women—it ignores their role in the geopolitical
economic system and reinforces gender essentialisms
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
Nowhere in the world do women share equal social and economic rights with men or the same access
as men to these productive resources. 3 Economic globalisation and development are creating new
challenges for women's rights as well as some new opportunities for advancing women's economic
independence and equality. The proliferation of armed conflicts, often caused by struggles to control
power and productive resources, has also hampered efforts to protect and prevent violence against
women. Furthermore, post-conflict and post humanitarian crisis and natural disaster processes have
tended to deepen gender inequalities in economic and political participation, affecting women's
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vulnerability to violence. Yet despite these realities, the current global political economic order is often
neglected in analyses of violence against women. Official United Nations approaches make no
linkages between the effects of financial crises, macroeconomic policies and trade liberalisation for
example, and the prevalence of violence against women. UN Security Council Resolutions on women,
peace and security single out sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings from ongoing forms of
violence against women before, during and after conflict. Moreover, they do not contextualise this
violence within the gendered structures of economic impoverishment and lack of opportunity that are
not addressed by political settlements or by peacekeeping missions. Not dissimilarly, in emergent
feminist security studies within the field of International Relations, the primary focus on sexual
violence in war and armed conflict and trafficking across borders, while seemingly appropriate given
the IR field's subject matter, risks perpetuating the invisibility of violence against women in peacetime
and within national borders. Lacking any thorough going analysis of the gendered social, political and
economic inequalities that shape women's vulnerability to violence in whatever setting, both UN
discourses and IR scholarship tend to reinforce gender essentialisms that view women as inherently
victims of violence - and thus, objects of protection - and men as the power holders. This article seeks
to rectify the neglect of contemporary global political-economic processes and their effect on the
prevalence of various forms of violence against women in UN discourses and IR scholarship. Given the
short space available, however, it cannot fully substantiate the argument that women's physical
security and freedom from violence are inextricably linked to the material basis of relationships that
govern the distribution and use of resources, entitlements and authority within the home, the
community and the transnational realm. This is the project of my forthcoming book.4 Here I can only
outline the key elements of a feminist political economy method for analysing the causes and
consequences of violence against women. The method is consistent with Ann Tickner's feminist
approach to global security, which emphasises the continuum of war/peace given women's experiences
of violence and defines security in broad, multidimensional terms which includes the elimination of all
social hierarchies that lead to political and economic injustice.5 I argue that employing such a feminist
political economy method could significantly improve the way both international policymakers and
international relations scholars treat violence against women and respond to its global scale and its
brutality.
Accounts of globalization are male
Sassen-96 (Saskia, Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Columbia, “Toward a Feminist
Analytics of the Global Economy,” 4 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 7 1996-1997)
My effort is to expand the analytic terrain within which we need to understand the global economy in
order to render visible what is now evicted from the account. My starting point is based on my studies
of the global economy over the last twenty years. Through these studies I have determined that the
mainstream account of economic globalization is confined to a very narrow analytic terrain. The
mainstream account operates like a "narrative of eviction," because it excludes a whole range of
workers, firms, and sectors that do not fit the prevalent images of globalization. And, in that sense, the
rhetoric of international relations, and its most formal instance, international law, can also be seen as
a narrative of eviction. This rhetoric traces the State as its exclusive subject and has excluded other
actors and subjects. These narratives are male; they are centered in a vast array of micropractices and
cultural forms enacted, constituted, and legitimized by men and/or in male- gendered terms.
Furthermore, on the operational level, one could say that notwithstanding the growing number of top
level women professionals in global economic activities and in international relations, both these worlds
can be specified as male-gendered insofar as each in its distinct way has the cultural properties and
power dynamics that we have historically associated with men of power, or at least some power.
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International economic studies are gendered—they valorize the work which just
happens to be performed by a majority of men and the elite while erasing the story of
women’s empowerment in the new globalized economy.
Sassen-96 (Saskia, Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at Columbia, “Toward a Feminist
Analytics of the Global Economy,” 4 Ind. J. Global Legal Stud. 7 1996-1997)
Alongside these new global and regional geographies of centrality is a vast territory that has become
increasingly peripheral, increasingly excluded from the major economic processes that are seen as
fueling economic growth in the new global economy. Formerly important manufacturing centers and
port cities have lost functions and are in decline, not only in the less developed countries but also in the
most advanced economies. Similarly in the valuation of labor inputs, the overvalorization of
specialized services and professional workers has marked many of the "other" types of economic
activities and workers as unnecessary or irrelevant to an advanced economy.' The corporate work
culture is overvalued while other kinds of work cultures are devalued. There are other forms of this
segmented marking of what is and what is not an instance of the new global economy. For example, the
mainstream account about globalization recognizes that there is an international professional class of
workers and highly internationalized business environments due to the presence of foreign firms and
personnel. What has not been recognized is the possibility that we are seeing an internationalized
labor market for low-wage manual and service workers and internationalized business environments
in immigrant communities. These processes continue to be couched in terms of immigration, a narrative
rooted in an earlier historical period. This signals that there are representations of the global or the
transnational which have not been recognized as such or are contested representations. 9 Similarly, in
the social sciences the most common way to proceed is to study such categories as economic power,
leading industries, or economic globalization from the top down. I agree with Janet Abu-Lughod that we
also need to proceed from the bottom up.30 The central assumption in much of my work has been that
we learn something about power through its absence and by moving through or negotiating the borders
and terrains that connect powerlessness to power. Power is not a silence at the bottom; its absence is
present and has consequences. The terms and language of the debate force particular positions and
preempt others. Among these is the question of immigration, as well as the multiplicity of work
environments it contributes in large cities, often subsumed under the notion of the ethnic economy
and the informal economy.3 Much of what we still narrate in the language of immigration and
ethnicity is actually a series of processes having to do with: (1) the globalization of economic activity,
cultural activity, and of identity formation; and, (2) the increasingly marked racialization of labor
market segmentation so that the components of the production process in the advanced global
information economy that take place in immigrant work environments are components not
recognized as part of the global information economy. Immigration and ethnicity are constituted as
otherness. Understanding them as a set of processes whereby global elements are localized,
international labor markets are constituted, and cultures from all over the world are de- and reterritorialized, placing them right there at the center along with the internationalization of capital as a
fundamental aspect of globalization.32 What we see at work here is a series of processes that valorize
and overvalorize certain types of outputs, workers, firms and sectors, and devalorize others. Does the
fact of gendering, e.g., the devaluing of female-typed jobs, facilitate these processes of
devalorization? We cannot take devalorization as a given: devalorization is a produced outcome. The
forms of devalorization of certain types of workers and work cultures I have described here are partly
embedded in the demographic transformations evident in large cities. The growing presence of
women, immigrants, and people of color in large cities along with a declining middle class have
facilitated the operation of devalorization processes. This is significant insofar as these cities are
strategic sites for the materialization of global processes and for the valorization of corporate capital.33
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How have these new processes of valorization and devalorization and the inequalities they produce
come about? The implantation of global processes and markets in major cities has meant that the
internationalized sector of the economy has expanded sharply and has imposed a new set of criteria for
valuing or pricing various economic activites and outcomes. This has had devastating effects on large
sectors of the urban economy. It is not simply a quantitative transformation; we see here the elements
for a new urban regime.34 These tendencies towards polarization assume distinct forms in: (1) the
spatial organization of the urban economy; (2) the structures for social reproduction; and (3) the
organization of the labor process. In these trends towards multiple forms of polarization lie conditions
for the creation of employment-centered urban poverty and marginality, and for new class formations.
The ascendance of the specialized services-led economy, particularly the new finance and services
complex, engenders what may be regarded as a new economic regime because, although this specialized
sector may account for only a fraction of a city's economy, it imposes itself on the entire economy. One
of these pressures is toward polarization, because of the possibility for superprofits in areas like
finance. This, in turn, contributes to devalorize manufacturing and low-value added services insofar as
these sectors cannot generate the superprofits typical in much financial activity. Low-value added
services and urban-based manufacturing are the sectors where women and immigrants predominate.
The super profit-making capacity of many leading industries is embedded in a complex combination of
new trends: (1) technologies that make possible the hypermobility of capital on a global scale and the
deregulation of multiple markets allowing the implementation of that hypermobility; (2) financial
innovations, such as securitization, which create liquid capital and allow it to circulate and make
additional profits; and (3) the growing demand for increasingly complex and specialized services in all
industries, which contributes to these services' valorization and often over-valorization, as illustrated in
the unusually high salary increases beginning in the 1980s for top-level professionals and CEOs.3 '
Globalization further adds to the complexity of these services, their strategic character, their glamour,
and to their over-valorization. The presence of a critical mass of firms with extremely high profit-making
capabilities increases the prices of commercial space, industrial services, and other business needs, and
thereby makes survival for firms with moderate profit-making capabilities increasingly precarious. And
while firms with moderate profits are essential to the operation of the urban economy and for the daily
needs of residents, their economic viability is threatened in a situation where finance and specialized
services can earn super-profits. High prices and profit levels in the internationalized sector and its
ancillary institutions, such as top-of-the-line restaurants and hotels, make it increasingly difficult for
other sectors to compete for space and investments. Many of these other sectors have experienced
considerable downgrading and/or displacement, for example, the replacement of neighborhood shops
tailored to local needs by upscale boutiques and restaurants catering to new high income urban elites.
There are some interesting research questions to pursue here to understand whether this
reconfiguration of economic spaces has had differential impacts on women and men, on male and
female-typed work cultures, on male and female-centered forms of power and empowerment.36 The
remainder of this section is a brief discussion of some of these areas for research. Inequality in the
profit-making capabilities of different sectors of the economy has always existed. But what we see
happening today takes place on another order of magnitude and is engendering massive distortions in
the operations of various markets, from housing to labor. For instance, the polarization among firms
and households and in the spatial organization of the economy results in the informalization of a
growing array of economic activities in advanced urban economies. When firms with low or modest
profit-making capacities experience an ongoing, if not increasing, demand for their goods and services
from households and other firms in a context where a significant sector of the economy makes superprofits, they often cannot compete even though there is an effective demand for what they produce.
Operating informally is often one of the few ways in which such firms can survive. This operation may
entail using spaces not zoned for commercial or manufacturing uses, such as basements in residential
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areas, or space that is not up to code in terms of health, fire, and other such standards. Similarly, new
firms in low-profit industries entering a strong market for their goods and services may only be able to
do so informally. Another option for firms with limited profit-making capabilities is to subcontract part of
their work to informal operations. Informalization often reintroduces the community and the household
as an important economic space. This question follows: Does the growth of informalization in advanced
urban economies reconfigure some types of economic relations between men and women? More
generally, we are seeing the formation of new types of labor market segmentation. Two characteristics
stand out. One is the weakening role of the firm in structuring the employment relation, which leaves
more to the market. A second form in this restructuring of the labor market is what could be described
as the shift of labor market functions to the household or community. These emerge as sites that should
be part of the theorization about particular types of labor market dynamics today. 7 The recomposition
of the sources of growth and of profit- making entailed by these transformations also contribute to a
reorganization of some components of social reproduction or consumption. While the middle strata still
constitute the majority, the conditions that contributed to their expansion and politico-economic power
in the post-war decades-the centrality of mass production and mass consumption in economic growth
and profit realization have been displaced by new sources of growth. Is the "systemic abandonment,"
i.e., radical economic marginalization, of a growing segment of households-specifically, low-income
female-headed households completely unconnected to this reorganization of consumption and social
reproduction? We need research and theorization that examines the possible articulations of these two
types of processes, each the subject of separate bodies of scholarship. The rapid growth of industries
with strong concentrations of high and low income jobs has assumed distinct forms in the consumption
structure, which in turn has a feedback effect on the organization of work and the types of jobs being
created. The expansion of the high-income work force in conjunction with the emergence of new
cultural forms has led to a process of high-income gentrification that rests, in the last analysis, on the
availability of a vast supply of low-wage workers. This has reintroduced--to an extent not seen in a very
long time--the whole notion of the "serving classes" in contemporary highincome households. The
immigrant woman serving the white middle class professional woman has replaced the traditional
image of the black female servant serving the white master. To some extent, the consumption needs of
the low-income population in large cities are met by manufacturing and retail establishments which are
small, rely on family labor, and often fall below minimum safety and health standards. Cheap, locally
produced sweatshop garments, for example, can compete with low-cost Asian imports. A growing range
of products and services, from low-cost furniture made in basements to "gypsy cabs" and family daycare,
is available to meet the demand for the growing low-income population. There are numerous instances
of how the increased inequality in earnings reshapes the consumption structure and how this in turn has
feedback effects on the organization of work, both in the formal and in the informal economy." There is,
to some extent, a joining of two different dynamics in the condition of women described above. On the
one hand, they are constituted as an invisible and disempowered class of workers in the service of the
strategic sectors constituting the global economy. This invisibility keeps them from emerging as
whatever would be the contemporary equivalent of the "labor aristocracy" of earlier economic
organizational forms, when a worker's position in leading sectors had the effect of empowering them-a
dynamic articulating the corporate and the labor sector in a manner radically different from today's. 9
On the other hand, the access to wages and salaries (even if low), the growing feminization of the job
supply, and the growing feminization of business opportunities brought about with informalization
alter the gender hierachies in which they find themselves.' This is particularly striking in the case of
immigrant women. There is a large literature showing that immigrant women's regular wage work
and improved access to other public realms have an impact on their gender relations." Women gain
greater personal autonomy and independence while men lose ground.42 Women gain more control over
budgeting and other domestic decisions and greater leverage in requesting help from men in domestic
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chores. Also, their access to public services and other public resources gives them a chance to become
incorporated in the mainstream society-they are often the ones in the household who mediate in this
process. It is likely that some women benefit more than others from these circumstances; we need more
research to establish the impact of class, education, and income on these gendered outcomes. 3 In
addition to the relatively improved empowerment of women in the household associated with waged
employment, there is a second important outcome-their greater participation in the public sphere and
their possible emergence as public actors. There are two arenas where immigrant women are active:
institutions for public and private assistance and the immigrant/ethnic community. The incorporation of
women in the migration process strengthens the settlement likelihood" and contributes to greater
immigrant participation in their communities and vis-a-vis the State. For instance, Hondagneu-Sotelo
found that immigrant women come to assume more active public and social roles which further
reinforces their status in the household and the settlement process." Women are more active in
community building and community activism, and they are positioned differently from men regarding
the broader economy and the State. They are the ones that are likely to have to handle the legal
vulnerability of their families in the process of seeking public and social services for their families.' This
greater participation by women suggests the possibility that they may emerge as more forceful and
visible actors and may make their role in the labor market more visible as well.4
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Economics – Mexico
Neoliberalist globalization in Mexico has led to sexual violence and femecide
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
In the Mexican border town, Ciudad Juarez, 377 women have been murdered in just over a decade,
many of them young women who migrated to work in the Maquila factories. The murders, one third
of which involved sexual violence, are said to have different motives from domestic violence to drug
trafficking but several analysts see femicides as the outcome of men's reactions to globalization and
the feminization of employment in the border . 35 region. Trade liberalisation has facilitated the
globalisation of export-oriented, labour-intensive industries. The creation of free trade zones
exacerbates gendered inequalities and creates deregulated environments in which violence against
women thrives. These industries, set up in 'free trade' or special economic zones exempt from many
government regulations, have largely employed women's labour; often young, migrant women from
rural areas hired on temporary contract at lower wages than men and with minimal benefits. Violence
against women workers, including abuse of reproductive rights (e.g. through mandatory pregnancy
screening), sexual harassment, rape and femicide, has been highly prevalent in many of these free
trade zones in developing countries. 36 The epigraph concerning the femicides in Ciudad Juarez on the
US-Mexico border, where 'Maquiladora' factories are located, illustrates the destabilising effects of
neoliberal globalisation.3 Thousands of young rural women came to Mexico's tax-free border cities
when the 1992 NAFTA agreement liberalised trade with the United States and the Mexican
government created these zones to attract foreign investment. They were treated as dispensable
workers and constructed as 'cheap labour' (relative to men), leading to high male unemployment in
the border cities and towns.38 Studies show that their influx resulted in lower wages for all, which
combined with male unemployment created resentment toward young women workers. Both the
multinational firms and the states concerned failed to protect these women from targeted, violent
abuse.39 Alicia Camacho argued that, just as women emerged as new political and economic agents,
they lost their claim to the fundamental rights of personal security. 40 The femicides in Ciudad Juarez
were the subject of the first inquiry under the optional protocol of the Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) undertaken by the CEDAW Committee.41 The
report of the Committee revealed the multiple vulnerabilities of women to violence in the border city:
'they were young, come from other parts of Mexico, living in poverty, working in maquilas where
protection for their personal security was poor, subject to deception and force'.42 The Committee
observed that the women did not enjoy basic social and economic rights including the right to decent
work, education, health care, housing, sanitation infrastructure and lighting.4 3 The panel
recommended ensuring compliance with the human rights provisions of CEDAW.44
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Economics – Microfinance
Neoliberal policies disproportionately affect women of color
Ireland 11 (Heather Montes, Doctoral student in Gender Studies at the Indiana University
“Transnational Feminism and the Microfinance (R)evolution: Excavating Microlending from
Neoliberalism”
http://academia.edu/855930/Transnational_Feminism_and_the_Microfinance_R_evolution_Excavating
_Microlending_from_Neoliberalism pgs.1-2) TYBG
Transnational feminist and U.S. women of color scholarship have documented the detrimental
consequences of neoliberal economic restructuring and capitalist globalization on poor women of
color of both the global North and South (Hill Collins2000; Mohanty 1991; Shiva 2002; Naples & Desai
2003). Indeed, capitalism has shown itself as an economic system that is exploitative of women and
the gendered division of labor from its early development. An interrogation of the history of U.S.
capital demonstrates that, it has always been interested in the subjugation of racialized women.
“Controlling black women’s bodies has been especially important for capitalis[m],” Hill Collins (2000)
conveys, and “black women’s labor, sexuality and fertility have all been exploited” (143) via capitalist
devices, beginning with the slavery system and continuing to modern day neocolonial global capital
systems. In the new global economy, feminists have critiqued the neocolonial processes of neoliberalism
whereby structural adjustment policies have been enacted by State governments at the
recommendation of the IMF and World Bank, having serious consequences for women living in poverty.
Increased privatization and corporatization and decreased spending on social services leave women
balancing the reliance on the power of their incomes along with the escalating demands on their
unpaid labor at home (Desai 2003; Erevelles 2006). Critics have pointed out the suspect intentions of
the IMF and World Bank policies in relation to women who they (claim to) seek to help. Nirmala
Erevelles (2006) entreats us to bring a critical feminist eye to “explore policy development and
institutional power from a historical perspective, and to always interrogate whose interests are being
served” (25). Rather than feminists accepting as true what global elite players such as the UN tell us is
empowering to women, we must bring a critical feminist eye to all policies, both those that claim to
be gender-oriented and those that do not.
Microfinance is just an offshoot of neolib, but the perm can solve
Ireland 11 (Heather Montes, Doctoral student in Gender Studies at the Indiana University
“Transnational Feminism and the Microfinance (R)evolution: Excavating Microlending from
Neoliberalism”
http://academia.edu/855930/Transnational_Feminism_and_the_Microfinance_R_evolution_Excavating
_Microlending_from_Neoliberalism pgs.2-3) TYBG
Currently microfinance, touted by the power elite, has effectively operated as a project almost
impervious to critique. Despite the feminist critiques of neoliberalism, globalization, and development,
which have “delegitimized economic restructuring” (Desai 2009, 94), microfinance has become one of
the most normalized aspects of neoliberal development programs of NGOs and the UN system (Karim
2011). Microfinance programs give microloans, the equivalent of typically $50-$100 US, primarily to
poor women of the global South. Women are targeted for loans primarily because they have shown to
be a good risk, and they invest more funds into family welfare than men. Microcredit is touted as
empowering women to move up out of poverty as borrowers are expected to use these funds to start
small businesses, or microenterprises. However, if feminists are to make interventions into every area
of political economy that impacts women’s lives, it is imperative that we understand microfinance in its
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current form as a tool of neoliberal global(izing) capital. “There is something astonishingly different,”
writes Jude L. Fernando (2006), “about how gender theorists/feminists approach the impact of
microcredit credit and other development interventions, e.g. the structural adjustments and free-trade
zones on women. They appear to be more complacent and less critical about the former than the latter”
(25). Why is it that microfinance has been under theorized by feminist political economists and is
seemingly beyond feminist critique? I believe that the rhetorical associations of microfinance with
women’s empowerment influence the ways both feminists and non-feminists think about microfinance
and its effects on women’s lives. Despite the rhetoric of women’s empowerment that circulates about
microfinance by its advocates and institutions, its discourses and practices are constructed in ways
that actually disempower women. I contend that microfinance, as it currently exists, does not attend
to the cause of transnational feminist economic justice. Instead of dismissing microfinance entirely, I
attempt to theorize the ways that microcredit could become a tool for economic justice and
“noncapitalist” economic formations (Gibson-Graham 2006) and further contribute to “non-corporate
globalizations” Manisha Desai (2009) speaks of. It is easy to assume that a policy that targets women,
and asserts to empower them, must be feminist. Nonetheless, feminists know the World Bank, IMF, and
other global powers have not yet instituted a radical course of action to alter the gendered world order.
Instead of being satisfied with policies that appear to benefit women, which is a vantage point from the
top down, we must as Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003)writes, read up the power structure, as I
attempt to do in this thesis.
Alt solves
Ireland 11 (Heather Montes, Doctoral student in Gender Studies at the Indiana University
“Transnational Feminism and the Microfinance (R)evolution: Excavating Microlending from
Neoliberalism”
http://academia.edu/855930/Transnational_Feminism_and_the_Microfinance_R_evolution_Excavating
_Microlending_from_Neoliberalism pgs.17-18) TYBG
The economic justice paradigm that I suggest presses forward from socialist feminist analysis through
transnational feminist anti-capitalist critique and breaks from single-axis, white/Western malecentered, non-feminist models of justice that focus on poverty as something that happens
“elsewhere,” outside of the Euro-American nation-state in particular, disregarding the interconnected
nature of global inequities and hegemonies. For instance, both socialist feminist and white male non
feminist analyses of poverty neglect the ways Western economic imperialism and neoliberalism have
contributed to a rise in poverty for women worldwide (Mohanty 2003). Rather, our analysis and
organizing around poverty issues ought to be “geographically broad and historically deep” (Farmer,
337), incorporating a complex analysis of the political economy of poverty and economic disparities,
taking into account colonialism, imperialism, globalization, neoliberal capitalism and the investments
these processes have in gendered, racialized, hetero patriarchal systems of power. Economic justice
concepts and practices must stand in direct response to structural violence, as articulated by Paul
Farmer, those “processes, historically given and often economically driven, by which human agency may
be constrained, whether through ritual, routine, or the hard surfaces of life” (337).
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Economics – Structural Adjustment
Global economic engagement policies lead to increased violence towards women
(structural adjustment specific)
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
Structural adjustment policies imposed by governments and international institutions have
disproportionately affected women and 'have led to increased impoverishment, displacement and
internal strife resulting from the political instabilities caused by devaluing national currencies,
increasing debt and dependence on foreign investment'.22 Women's labour has become part of the
competitive dynamic of globalisation in part as a survival strategy in families and countries. Yet, a large
number of women workers in the informal economy, care sector and in unpaid work often fall outside
recognised labour or human rights standards. These women largely from the global South, are highly
vulnerable to new forms of gender-based violence associated with the displacement of populations,
sex trafficking, home-based production, restrictive immigration and exploitation of local and migrant
workers especially around special economic zones and large developments. Conflict, war and natural
disaster have further impoverished societies as they make trade- offs between military spending and
spending for social and economic development, creating conditions for severe violence against
women.23 Post-conflict peacebuilding may involve privatisation of public services and infrastructure
that places greater burden on women's unpaid labour in the household,24 as well as the
establishment of political and legal systems with limited or no significant participation by women.
Moreover, post-conflict and disaster reconstruction processes often maintain the culture of impunity
toward violence against women and introduce new forms of gender discrimination in economic and
political institutions that fuel violence against women and girls. The vignettes below flesh out these
dynamics further. They illustrate with specific examples rather than comprehensive analysis how global
political-economic processes are linked to patterns of violence against women.
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Economics – Footnoting
Through the masculine lens of economic engagement, gender becomes a “separate
issue” that is a last priority, which is harmful to women
Marchand 94 [Marianne H, Professor of International Relations at the University of the Americas,
"Gender And New Regionalism In Latin America: Inclusion/Exclusion." Third World Quarterly 15.1
(1994): 63-76.]
Once the concept of integration has been grounded in the norm of reactive autonomy it takes on a
masculinist outlook. In the articles under discussion, two aspects stand out in particular: the
economistic approach to the question of regionalism resulting in the introduction of a dichotomised
hierarchy and the inscribing onto the concept of regionalism/integration the dual (implied) notion of
concentration cum homogenisation. Obviously, when analysing the question of (economic) integration
it is necessary to discuss economics. However, in discussions about NAFTA the economic logic (of
regionalism) is assumed to be prior to all other structures and relations. Consequently, in these
debates NAFTA's economic aspects are used as a point of reference. This is true for advocates as well
as opponents of the agreement. For instance, objections of environmental groups have concentrated
on the effects of economic activities on the environment. I am not suggesting here that economic
issues should not be discussed nor that they are unimportant. However, what I am arguing is that
through the masculinist lens of reactive autonomy there is a tendency to prioritise and dichotomise
issues."*" This obviously makes it more difficult to see the interrelatedness among oppositional
viewpoints. The prioritising of the economy thus virtually forces opponents to compartmentalise their
objections and discuss them as 'separate issues', instead of showing the equally interrelated but
negative effects of NAFTA. A side-effect of this compartmentalisation is the introduction of a certain
hierarchy among objections. Needless to say, in this 'hierarchy of objections' gender dimensions are
not a first priority. For instance, the critical Barkin comments: They [Mexican policy makers]
acknowledge that unemployment will grow, at least in the short run, because the jobs created in export
industries cannot keep pace with the jobs eliminated by cheap imports."" It is important to remember
that Barkin is not speaking of just any kind of export industry. He is referring to the maquiladoras, which
have a predominantly female work force. However, he does not mention the inescapable impact of this
restructuring on women's lives. In sum, for Barkin NAFTA's negative effects on unemployment rates in
the maquiladora industry are important, not the gendered nature of this unemployment.
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Economics – “Integration”
US international relations are masculine and allow silencing, exclusion and
objectifying of women
Marchand 94 [Marianne H, Professor of International Relations at the University of the Americas,
"Gender And New Regionalism In Latin America: Inclusion/Exclusion." Third World Quarterly 15.1
(1994): 63-76.]
Thanks to the assumed superiority of the economic logic (of regionalism), integration also implies a
'dichotomised hierarchy' as well as a process of concentrating cum homogenisation. Here the
transnational sector, as carrier- representative of the (neoliberal) capitalist logic, defines the parameters
of integration. According to Baer the strategy of production-sharing should be central to NAFTA: 'A
North American production-sharing alliance will help US industries gain competitiveness in a world
where multipolar geoeconomic rivalry is supplanting bipolar geostrategic conflict.''^ For Baer there is no
doubt that the USA will assume the leader's role in this production-sharing alliance. Pastor concurs:
The regional. Hemispheric, and geopolitical implications of Salinas' proposal also argue for an
immediate, positive response by the United States. North America— Canada, the United States, and
Mexico—have resources, complementary labor skills, and a market of 350 million people. The United
States sits in the middle, with its two neighbours anxiously circling each *^ Baer's modernist narrative
subscribes to a masculinist notion of integration which not only emphasises hierarchy but which is
also exclusionary in nature. He wants to exclude 'those outside NAFTA': the Asian and Europeans. This
'us-them dichotomy' is also true for Pastor, who argues that: Unlike the 1930s, when the US withdrew
into Hemispheric isolation rather than face the new power of Germany and Japan, today the new
Hemispheric community could be a source of geopolitical leverage."^ In contrast to Pastor, however,
Baer also acknowledges and justifies the exclusionary nature of NAFTA for those living within its bounds:
Ultimately the three economies may blend into an integrated production network and share a universal,
science-based culture that traces its roots to Francis Bacon. The modem denizens of urban Mexico will
have more in common with their counterparts in Toronto and Chicago than with the campesinos in rural
Oaxaca.''^ It seems unlikely that the maquila women will pass Baer's test of 'modem denizens'.
Although they work in 'modem' factories, these women do not conform to the picture of 'modem
cosmopolitan man'. In other words, they find themselves economically included (read: exploited)
while socially and politically excluded . The masculinist inscription of homogenisation onto the concept
of integration is also apparent in Baer's economist narrative. According to him, 'NAFTA signifies that
Mexico has become a North American country, ready to share Westem entrepreneurial values and
participate in Westem capital markets'.'**' Pastor appears to be less sanguine about Mexico adopting
North American values.'*'' Initially, he advocates a process of homogenisation in which both US and
Mexican societies are undergoing some transformations, rather than Mexico alone moving closer (to the
USA) by adopting North American/US values. However, in the rest of the article Pastor only mentions
the difficult ongoing transitions in Mexican society while trying to modemise its economy and
democratise its politics. Because the transition of US society is never discussed in the article, it leaves
the impression that the USA doesn't really need it! Moreover, in its attempt to transform politically and
economically, Mexico, not surprisingly, embraces North American values. In other words. Pastor's ideas
about the homogenising effects of NAFTA strongly resemble those of Baer after all. The masculinist
writing of integration allows, then, for the silencing, exclusion and objectifying of women and
feminist values . The integration story being told is one that prioritises economic rationality, involves
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dichotomised hierarchies, and equates integration with concentration cum homogenisation. Women
can only appear in this story in subordinate/subservient roles. They are among the ones who have to
provide the required 'flexible labour' which enables companies to become more competitive globally
through the introduction of jit-methods. They thus serve the geo-economic designs of North American
transnational companies. Their ongoing economic marginalisation is being accompanied by further
social and political exclusion. Likewise, any feminist concerns about the 'new regionalism' are being
excluded. Embedding the (theorising about) 'new regionalism' in the dual norm of reactive autonomy
and minimal obligations effectively entails a silencing of feminist concerns about relational autonomy
and diffuse reciprocity. Consequently, integration is being presented as a vertical, top-down form of
cooperation whereby horizontal relational autonomy is being excluded.
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Poverty Rhetoric
Western poverty discourse excludes women and turn case
Ireland 11 (Heather Montes, Doctoral student in Gender Studies at the Indiana University
“Transnational Feminism and the Microfinance (R)evolution: Excavating Microlending from
Neoliberalism”
http://academia.edu/855930/Transnational_Feminism_and_the_Microfinance_R_evolution_Excavating
_Microlending_from_Neoliberalism pgs.21-22) TYBG
Prevailing poverty discourse shapes and is shaped by controlling images and ideologies of the poor.
Controlling images, according to Hill Collins, work to “help justify the social practices that characterize
the matrix of domination in the United States” (93). Employing socially constructed categories to
naturalize the conditions the poor find themselves in, whether attributing fault to the poor for their
conditions or classifying them as better “suited” to their lot in life, provides easy explanations for a
complex set of relations of structural violence. Baker (2000) articulates how the myth of pulling oneself
up by the bootstraps intersects with controlling images to perpetuate inequality. These mythologies
mystify poverty by erasing the historical and economic conditions that produce, indeed require, it in
advanced capitalism. These discourses then replace history with a cultural myth: that anyone who is
willing to work hard will rise out of poverty and that anyone who cannot rise out of poverty is either
unwilling to do so […] or naturally incapable of any human development.” So while poverty is a social
construct which is derived from the very systems that we often claim empower citizens to succeed,
controlling images and hegemonic discourse provide an excuse for the fractures in the system that
blames poverty on the poor. Dorothy Allison (1994) terms this “the politics of they” and she
interrogates how such politics are grounded in socially constructed categories of race, gender,
sexuality and class which serve to justify the domination of a subjugated group by a dominant one: “I
have tried to understand the politics of they, why human beings fear and stigmatize the different while
secretly dreading that they might be one of the different themselves” (35). The discourse that
constructs a politics of they around poverty frequently takes a dichotomous form that I seek to
problematize, either a) denigration of the poor, marking them as different from other people,
especially wealthy people, and further, as inferior (Katz 1989); or b) romanticization of poverty and of
the poor as remarkably strong, or inherently able to endure‟ conditions that other, particularly
wealthy, people could not (Hill Collins 2009). These competing discourses— of the undeserving poor
and deserving poor — mutually exclude the voices and agency of the poor and particularly, poor
women. A problematic and powerful aspect of the discourse around poverty is the construction of the
poor as abject subjects who cannot speak for or represent themselves. Since the voices of the poor are
excluded from the definitions and representations of their existences, these externally-defined
characterizations, whether denigrating or romanticizing, are problematic and operate in controlling
and stifling ways (Hill Collins 190). Katz (1989) elaborates, “[b]y mistaking socially constructed
categories for natural distinctions, we reinforce inequality and stigmatize even those we set out to
help” (6). Indeed, these discourses maintain the hegemony of the economic elite while/through
informing State policy. The intersections of gender and race become quite salient in these policy
decisions, as racialization of women of color as undeserving poor “welfare queens” had major
repercussions on U.S. welfare reform of the 1980s and 90s (Omi & Winant 1994).
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Every representation of poverty that uses an us them ethos is counterproductive and
ensures replication of the same
Ireland 11 (Heather Montes, Doctoral student in Gender Studies at the Indiana University
“Transnational Feminism and the Microfinance (R)evolution: Excavating Microlending from
Neoliberalism”
http://academia.edu/855930/Transnational_Feminism_and_the_Microfinance_R_evolution_Excavating
_Microlending_from_Neoliberalism pgs.24-26) TYBG
The romanticization of poverty shifts from a callous and scornful, negative invention of the poor as
parasitic and undeserving and as an alternative attempts to create a sympathetic, positive fantasy that
fixates on an archetype of “strength” inherent to particular poor bodies. Mythologies of the deserving
poor also rely on biologizing tropes. Though in this instance the controlling image of the poor as
deserving of aid conjures a positive stereotype, it is still dehumanizing. Dorothy Allison refers to this
contrived position as the “the truly worthy poor,” those “hard-working, ragged but clean, and
intrinsically honorable” persons that are deserving of public sympathies (18). Rather than reflecting the
reality of the poor, or characterizing a positive label that the poor appreciate, Allison describes how this
myth promoted her family’s self -destruction because they did not fit the deserving poor ideal (18).
Especially compelling as it intersects with dominant ideologies of motherhood and ableist rhetoric, the
model of the deserving poor is often directed at poor single mothers, such as those who work
numerous part-time service jobs to support their families. These women are often discerned as
possessing inherent strength rather than a desperate impetus for survival, laboring under the harsh
realities of economic violence that ensnare her in a cycle of low-wages that never quite meet the cost of
living. Hill Collins remarks how this representation of the strong deserving poor, particularly the strong,
poor mother of color, “fail[s] to see the very real costs of mothering to African-American women” (Hill
Collins 189) which become naturalized as the self-sacrificing mother’s duty. Absorption of poverty by the
family structure and by women’s mother - work “obscures the sources of poverty in the labor market,
discrimination, and public policy” (Katz, 222). The economic, physical, emotional toll she bears and the
reliance on both her cheap waged labor for capital accumulation and her unpaid labor in the family
sphere are portrayed as natural and inevitable costs that mothers bear for their children. Embedded in
this discourse are deeply gendered, racialized and classed understandings of maternality. Though
white, middle-class mothers are encouraged to stay in the home and care for their children, poor
mothers of color are expected to toil outside the home as cheap labor for capital while working
double shifts to care for their children, or they quickly can become the
undeserving poor. Ironically, the paradox of the deserving poor is that those who are deemed
deserving of aid are designated so as a result of not receiving it. Katz presents an antidote to dismantle
the poverty discourse and controlling images of the poor: We can think about poor people as them‟ or
as us.‟ For the most part, Americans have talked about, them.‟ Even in the language of social science,
as well as ordinary conversation and political rhetoric, poor people usually remain outsiders, strangers
to be pitied or despised, helped or punished, […] but rarely [are seen as] full citizens (236). Moreover,
Allison suggests that we must reject externally-imposed classifications that encourage us to dismiss one
another, arguing these categories “need to be excavated from the inside” (35). To achieve an economic
justice agenda, us and them must be indistinguishable, or in other words, we must all regard each
other as full citizens of the human race. And a transnational feminist vision of economic justice places
agency and subjectivity of women, and that of other marginalized populations, at the center of our
economic justice analyses and our organizing.
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Globalization I/L
The inevitable failure of neoliberal economic policies will hit women the hardest
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
The expansion of women's labour market participation in developed countries and the reduction of
state welfare provisions have fuelled a growing demand for workers in the growing service sector. The
employment of foreign-born women has partially met this demand extending across an increasingly
broad range of economic sectors, from prostitution and sex work, to domestic service, child and agedcare, and including highly regulated occupations such as nursing. Neoliberal structural reforms have
created debt, unemployment, reduced social services and increased poverty especially in developing
countries, requiring more women from those countries to become income-earners for their families.
Migration has been one option for women to receive an income and provide economic security for their
families. Women are often chosen by their families to migrate based on the expectation that they will
sacrifice themselves to a greater degree than men for the welfare of their families - i.e., work harder,
remit a higher proportion of their earnings, spend less on themselves, and endure worse living
conditions.56 In 2005 women were nearly half of all economic migrants (95 out of 191 million) and they
dominate in migration streams to developed countries. Remittances from international migration in
2005 totaled US$251 billion and have had a significant effect on diminishing poverty in developing
countries, 7 although these remittances have been falling since the onset of the financial crisis with
households cutting back on services. Vulnerability to violence is frequently part of the employment
relationship for migrant women workers due to the unequal power relations at work based on the
combined oppressions of gender, class, nationality and ethnicity. 5 8 Migrant women usually work in
poor conditions with low social status, live in degrading housing situations, and lack basic legal
protections and opportunities for redress. Domestic workers, for instance, are typically excluded from
standard labour practices such as minimum wage, regular payment of wages, a weekly day off and
paid leave. Employers evade domestic labour laws and governments rarely monitor their observance
in the domestic sphere.59 Labour-sending countries for their part have an economic incentive to
ignore their breach as they benefit from the high levels of remittances and may not wish to jeopardise
their relations with relevant host countries. Structural inequalities in global trade regimes allow
freedom of movement for firms, investors and professional workers typically from developed
countries but limit the movement of low-skilled workers usually from developing countries. Very few
countries have ratified the international conventions that extend citizenship and labour rights to migrant
workers. Just twenty-three per cent of states have ratified the 1949 ILO Convention on Migration for
Employment, only ten per cent have ratified the 1975 ILO Convention Concerning Migration in Abusive
Conditions and the Promotion of Equality of Opportunity and the Treatment of Migrant Workers, and a
mere seventeen per cent of states have signed the 1990 International Convention on the Protection of
the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families.60 There are clear linkages between
violence against migrant women workers and the failure of states to protect these women workers by
monitoring minimum labour standards and ensuring access to adequate housing, education, and
alternative employment opportunities.61
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Economic policy must be held accountable for the role it plays in the marginalization
of women in the workforce—states’ responses to human trafficking prove that
without a gendered account of the economic agency of trafficked peoples,
globalization will only worsen the situation for women and minorities.
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
Migrant women working in the sex sector as well as those trafficked for prostitution face extreme
vulnerabilities. Trafficking is the underside of migration and inseparable from processes of
globalisation and trade liberalisation. 62 Yet it is more often addressed as a state security and
immigration issue or even a problem of violence against women (as in the 1995 Beijing Platform for
Action) but not as an economic issue, relating to the loss of economic opportunities brought about by
state and global restructuring. The trade in human beings is part of the globalisation of trade in goods,
investment, production and services, and needs to be part of trade policy discussions at the World
Trade Organization.63 This recognition would make it clear that all trade occurs in an institutional and
moral context and that trade policy as a result must be held accountable for its social as well as its
economic impacts. Increasing rates of trafficking are linked with women's low socio-economic status,
gender discrimination in education, employment and business and women's relative lack of economic
opportunities in specific contexts of neoliberal globalisation. The majority of trafficked women have
made a decision to migrate in search of better economic opportunities, not to be abducted, kidnapped,
or to work in indentured labour conditions.64 State policies that treat trafficked women as criminals or
mere victims in need of rescue and rehabilitation fail to take account of their economic agency and
their basic human rights in the prevention, protection and prosecution of trafficking.65 States often
seek to control women and police their bodies rather than empower them. 66 Indeed, some argue
that it is not migration for sex work that should be abolished, but rather the power relations between
trafficked women and traffickers which involve physical, psychological and economic violence against
women. When slavery was abolished, for instance, it was the power relationship that was abolished, not
work in the cotton fields or in domestic contexts. Globalisation introduces new vulnerabilities to
violence, as well as offering potential for empowerment through labour migration. But neoliberal
government policies that fail to attend to the basic social and economic entitlements of individuals
and families make violence against women a more likely outcome than empowerment.68 Restrictive
immigration policies focused on national security and a narrow construction of economic interests
lead to greater economic exploitation, physical abuse and violence against migrant women workers.
Research evidence shows that where countries have male biased immigration laws, women migrants are
more vulnerable to violence. Prostitutes and domestic workers require not just cultural 'recognition' to
redress their experiences of violence but material 'redistribution.' 69 Rather than restricting women's
and girls' right to migrate and seek work, 'the real challenge lies in creating the guarantees for them to
do so safely and with dignity'.
The plan’s neoliberal attempts at globalization are directly responsible for increased
violence towards women—globalization ruins the values which traditionally accrue to
men, and this causes domestic violence
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
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One of the ways globalisation processes perpetuate violence against women is through men's
reactions to these processes and the loss of male entitlement they often bring about. As mentioned
above, firms in competitive, global markets may prefer to hire women over men where their labour is
deemed 'cheaper' due to prevailing gender structures and ideologies. Thus, where neoliberal reforms
open economies to global competition there may be increased opportunities for women to enter the
labour market and gain economic independence. The obverse of women's economic empowerment is
men's economic disempowerment. Thus, violence against women may actually rise as women assume
non-traditional roles and gain greater access to these economic opportunities and resources;
contradicting the association between women's employment and empowerment in indicators like the
gender development index.25 Male violence against intimate women partners may increase especially
when the male partner is unemployed, and/or feels his power is undermined in the household.26 As the
epigraph attests, men have been socially-constructed to be breadwinners, assuming control over
income and resources as well as women, and these masculine breadwinner identities are threatened
by women's newly valued economic roles. In the context of neoliberal restructuring and economic
crises, men may be unable to find alternative employment that fulfils their visions of themselves as
family breadwinners. This may lead them to act out violently against women and children in the home
and in public spaces compensating for the loss of economic control. Research evidence also shows
that a reduction in male incomes challenges norms of masculinity and exacerbates tensions between
men and women.27 In Latin America and the Caribbean, the severely inequitable distribution of
wealth is considered to be one of the chief factors fuelling a rise in the rates of domestic violence,
among the highest rates in the world.28 Yet, because conventional economic and legal analysis do not
consider power dynamics in the household, unlike feminist political economy, 'the relationship
between high returns to business, and poverty and violence [against women] at the household level
remains invisible'.29
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Democracy Link
Democratization includes a transition process that furthers misogyny
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 105-107, MM]
Analyses of democratization are built on traditional definitions of democracy that are based on the
legacy of Western liberal democracy, a legacy that has been problematic for women. Feminist
political theorists have reexamined the meaning of democracy and its gendered implications by going
back to the origins of Western democratic institutions. In her reevaluation of social contract theory,
Carole Pateman has outlined how the story of the social contract as articulated by seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century European political theorists has been treated as an account of the creation of a
public sphere of civil freedom in which only men were endowed with the necessary attributes for
entering into contracts. Liberal definitions of citizens as nonsexed autonomous individuals outside any
social context abstract from a Western male model. Evolving notions of citizenship in the West were
based on male, property-owning heads of households : thus, democratic theory and practice have
been built on the male-as-norm engaged in narrowly defined political activities.31 Women, Pateman
claims, were not party to the original contract; rather, they were incorporated into the private sphere
through the marriage contract as wives subservient to their husbands, rather than as individuals. The
private sphere, a site of subjection, is part of civil society, but separate from the “civil” sphere; each
gains meaning from the other and each is mutually dependent on the other.32 This separation of the
public and private spheres has had important ramifications for the construction and evolution of
political and economic institutions at all levels; feminists see them as intimately related, however. What
goes on in the public sphere of politics and the economy cannot be understood as separate from the
private. Historically, therefore, terms such as citizen and head of household were not neutral but
associated with men. Even in states where women have achieved formal or near-formal equality,
feminists have claimed that this historical legacy still inhibits their political and economic
participation on an equal basis with men . As feminists from the South have pointed out, what is
“public” in one society may be “private” in another; it is true, however, that women’s activities, such as
reproduction and child rearing, tend to be devalued in all societies. Nevertheless, the evolution of
democratic practices and institutions and their attendant notions of individual rights have certainly had
benefits for women; the concept of rights and equality were important rationales for the suffrage
movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West as well as for movements for
women’s liberation and human rights in various parts of the world today. But, as Pateman’s analysis
suggests, the liberal tradition continues to present particular problems for women; as she points out,
aspiring to equality assumes that individuals can be separated from sexually differentiated bodies.33
Deep structures, upheld by the public/ private divide, have continued to keep women in positions of
subordination, even after the acquisition of the vote or other legal gains; despite the fact that women
have always participated in the public sphere as workers, they do not have the same civil standing as
men in most societies. For example, in twentieth-century welfare laws in the West, men have generally
been defined as breadwinners and women as dependents; likewise, immigration laws and rules
governing refugees define women as dependents with negative implications for their legal status . In
the United States, the concept of first-class citizen has frequently been tied to military service, a
disadvantage for women running for political office.34 Studies of democratic transitions in Russia, East
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Europe, and Latin America demonstrate some of the problems associated with the legacy of the
Western liberal tradition.35 Transitions in Russia and East Europe That democratic transitions may
actually be negative for women was most evident in the former Soviet Union and some states in East
Europe: gender relations associated with the public/private divide there became more pronounced .
Because of the elimination of quota systems in legislatures in this region, the number of women in
institutional politics was sharply reduced after transitions to democracy, with the proportion of women
elected to representative bodies declining from an average of 33 percent to 10 percent. 36 This decline
was especially significant given that legislative bodies began to play a real role in policymaking. It is
important to note, however, that women’s representation under Communist regimes was largely
window dressing: women were equally marginalized from real centers of power before and after
democratic transitions.37 In East Europe and Russia, the drop in political participation of women during
the transition was accompanied by a loss of economic status. Applauded by liberals, the transition to
market economies and structural adjustment associated with the opening to the global economy took
disproportionate numbers of women out of the labor force because of the need to shed labor to
adjust to market competition; as in other cases of structural adjustment, the state sector, where
women are often employed, shrank dramatically. In the early 1990s, in all of eastern Central Europe
except Hungary, women constituted 50 to 70 percent of total unemployed; in post-Soviet Russia, in
1992 they constituted 70 percent.38 Where women were working, they tended to be confined to
traditional, low-paying “female” occupations. Given the diminishing demand for labor and the erosion of
state-provided social services such as day care and health care, women were reconstructed as
dependent wives, mothers, consumers, and caregivers; with child-care and maternity leave being
dismantled, women were cast as “unreliable” workers. Under socialism, the family played the role of an
embryonic civil society representing antistate freedom; following democratization, the family was
reconstructed, along lines consistent with the liberal tradition, as male-dominated, female-dependent.
At the same time as women were reassigned to the private sphere, the public sphere was being
revalued, thus accentuating the public/private divide.
Solvency - only re-evaluating democratization from the bottom-up can combat
gendered oppression
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 108-110, MM]
Democratic Transitions in Latin America: Assessments of democratic transitions in Latin America have
suggested a mixed but more positive picture. The region has a long history of women’s political
mobilization, and the democratic transitions of the 1980s coincided with the reemergence of feminist
movements. Many of them, it is true, had started under previous authoritarian governments; in any
event, women’s human-rights groups, feminist groups, and organizations of poor urban women were
all important in the democratic transitions.43 Human-rights groups became active in the late 1970s in
countries campaigning against abuses perpetrated by military regimes (e.g., Argentina and Chile). Urban
based movements were responding to the economic crises of the 1980s exacerbated by the
implementation of structural-adjustment programs. Although these movements were tolerated
because military governments did not see women’s activities as dangerous enough to warrant their
acting to suppress then, some of them actually became increasingly marginalized after the advent of
democracy ; the reinstatement of political rights was not accompanied by a widening of social rights.
Although civilian rule in Latin America opened up new opportunities for women to influence policy
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formation, the political visibility of women did not result in success at the polls. Many political parties
of the center and the left put women’s issues on their agenda, but there was no significant increase in
electoral representation.44 Women’s groups were faced with the dilemma of autonomy versus
integration: should they work within new institutions and parties and risk being co-opted? Or should
they preserve their independence by remaining outside and risk marginalization? It is clear, therefore,
from both post-Soviet and Latin American cases, that in assessing gender relations in post
authoritarian rule it is necessary to distinguish between institution-level democracy, which is the
focus of the literature on democratic transitions, and broader conceptions of democracy. Rethinking
Democratization with Gendered Lenses: Proponents of democratization have adopted and supported a
narrow and restricted institutional definition of democracy that is focused on the political system seen
as separate from the economy and civil society; this top down definition of democracy sidesteps
issues raised by feminist political theorists concerning the distribution of power, social and economic
equality, and definitions of citizenship beyond a restricted political form. It ignores activities outside
the conventional political arena in which women are more likely to be involved. For example, women
involved in social movements that are working to improve economic redistribution and human rights
and to effect social change more generally do not appear as political actors. Feminists are also
analyzing the extent to which the gendering of political concepts such as rights and equality that come
out of the Western liberal tradition are transposed to the international level. When proponents of
liberal democracy and marketization speak of the spread of human rights based on Western notions of
individualism, feminists have cautioned that both definitions of human rights and the kinds of
violations that get attention from Western states and their human-rights communities may be gender
biased. Since basic needs and welfare provision so often fall to women, and since women are
disproportionately economically disadvantaged, the preference by Western liberal states for political
rights over economic rights may also present particular problems for women. In addition, since humanrights violations are usually defined as violations by officials of the state, domestic violence has not been
a priority on the international human-rights agenda. In order to understand the role of gender—the
effects of democratic transitions on women and their activities in these transitions— we need a
redefinition of democracy that starts at the bottom . Generally women are better represented in local
politics; often they are working outside regular political channels. Georgina Waylen has claimed that any
analysis of democratization that fails to incorporate a gendered perspective—ignoring the actions of
certain groups—will be flawed.45 Therefore, the liberal democratic state must be reexamined for its
gender biases, as well as its class and racial biases; definitions of representation and citizenship in the
spaces in which political life occur need to be rethought. Arguing that patriarchal structures are deeply
embedded in most types of political regimes, democratic and otherwise, certain internationalist
feminists have looked beyond the state to build institutions and networks that are more likely than
the state to diminish gender and other social hierarchies. Given the barriers to formal political office
that exist for women in most states, including democracies, women activists frequently bypass the state
by working either at the grassroots level or by joining forces transnationally to work for women’s rights
at the global level.
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Problem Solving
Problem-solving dialogues are gendered, their predictive models cover over the
localized silencing of women and nature
J. Ann Tickner - Professor in the School of International Relations at University of Southern California,
President of the International Studies Association, the most respected and widely known scholarly
association in this field - Dec., 1997 “You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between
Feminists and IR Theorists” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4.
The scientific turn in postwar realism was also adopted by behavioralists, neorealists, liberal
institutionalists, and some peace researchers, all of whom drew on models from the natural sciences
and from economics to build *their theories. Seeking scientific respectability, international theorists
turned to the natural sciences for their methodologies; many of them were also defending the
autonomy of rational inquiry against totalitarian ideologies, this time of postwar Communism. Theories
were defined as sets of logically related, ideally causal propositions, to be empirically tested or
falsified in the Popperian sense. Scientific research programs were developed from realist assumptions
about the international system serving as the "hard core" (Lakatos and Musgrave, 1970). While
international theorists never sought the precision of Newton's grand schemes of deterministic laws and
inescapable forces, they did claim that the international system is more than the constant and regular
behavior of its parts (Hollis and Smith, 1990:50). Popular in the discipline, structural theories account
for behavior by searching for causes. These theorists believe that events are governed by the laws of
nature; in other words, behavior is generated by structures external to the actors themselves (Hollis
and Smith, 1990:3).18 In all these endeavors, theorists have generally assumed the possibility as well as
the desirability of conducting systematic and cuinulative scientific research. Borrowing from economics,
game theory and rational choice theory became popular for explaining the choices and optimizing
behavior of self-interested states in an anarchical international system as well as a means for
interpreting the actions of their foreign policy decision makers. Given the dangers and unpredictability
of such a system, theory building was motivated by the desire to control and predict (Waltz, 1979:6). l9
The search for systematic inquiry could, hopefully, contribute to the effort of diminishing the likelihood of future conflict. Broadly defined as
positivist, this turn to science represents a view of the creation of knowledge based on four assumptions: first, a belief in the unity of sciencethat is, the same methodologies can apply in the natural and social worlds; second, that there is a distinction between facts and values, with
facts being neutral betcveen theories; third, that the social world has regularities like the natural world; and fourth, that the way to determine
the truth of statements is by appeal to neutral facts or an empiricist epistemology (Smith, 1997: 168).2O Feminist Theory, Since it entered the
field of international relations in the late 1980s, feminist theory has often, but not exclusively, been located within the critical voices of the
"third debate," a term articulated by Yosef Lapid (1989). Although they are not all postmodern, or even post-Enlightenment, in their normative
orientation at least, an assumption sometimes implied by conventional scholars, many contemporary feininist international relations scholars
would identify theinselves as postpositivists in terins of Lapid's articulation of the term and in terins of the definition of positivism outlined
above. While there is no necessary connection betcveen feminist approaches and post-positivism, there is a strong resonance for a variety of
reasons including a commitment to epistemological pluralism as well as to certain ontological sensitivities. With a preference for hermeneutic,
historically based, humanistic and philosophical traditions of knowledge cumulation, rather than those based on the natural sciences, feminist
theorists are often skeptical of empiricist methodologies that claim neutrality of facts.
While many feminists-do see structural
regularities, such as gender and patriarchy, they define them as socially constructed and variable
across time, place, and cultures, rather than as universal and natural. Agreeing with Robert Cox's
assertion that theory is always for someone and for some purpose, the goal of feminist approaches is
similar to that of critical theory as defined by Cox. While not all historians would accept this link, Cox
asserts that critical theory "stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how that
order came about": it can, therefore, be a guide to strategic action for bringing about an alternative
order (Cox, 198 1 :129-30). Cox contrasts critical theory with conventional theory which he labels
"problemsolving,"- a type of conversation that Tannen associates with men (1990:ch. 2). Problemsolving takes the world as it finds it and implicitly accepts the prevailing order as its framework (Cox,
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1981:130). Since feminist theorists believe that the world is characterized by gender hierarchies that
are detrimental to women, they would be unlikely to take such an epistemological stance. In the words
of one feminist scholar who defines herself as a post-positivist, "postpositivism compels our attention to
context and historical process, to contingency and uncertainty, to how we construct, rather than discover, our world(s)" (Peterson, 1992a:57). In constructing their approaches to international theory,
feminists draw on a variety of philosophical traditions and literatures outside international relations and
political science within which most IR scholars are trained. While IR feminists are seeking genuine
knowledge that can help them to better understand the issues with which they are concerned, the IR
training they receive rarely includes such knowledge. Hence, they, like scholars in other critical
approaches, have gone outside the discipline to seek what they believe are more appropriate
methodologies for understanding the social construction and maintenance of gender hierarchies. This
deepens the level of misunderstanding and miscommunication and, unfortunately, often leads to
negative stereotyping on all sides of these epistemological divides.
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Latina I/L
The aff’s attempts to “democratize” or “free” Latin America without first considering
the Latina mindset are doomed to fail and reproduce the same structural deficiencies
they hope to solve
Schutte 11 (Ofelia, Ph.D. in philosophy and Professor Emerita at University of Southern Florida,
"Engaging Latin American Feminisms Today: Methods, Theory, Practice." Hypatia 26.4 pgs. 798-799)
TYBG
Concepts of freedom and liberation need to be grounded in a historical and cultural context if they are
to be understood appropriately. If we think of a giant picture of Latin America as moving gradually
from the 1980s through the 1990s into a global neo-liberal political economy, one of the interesting
features to notice is that at the same time many countries of the region were transitioning out of local
political military dictatorships, they were entering new forms of economic and political dependence on
the terms dictated by instruments of the neo-liberal capitalist global economy, such as the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund. Feminist activists were able to benefit from the gradual erosion
of the military dictatorships, but at the same time many were absorbed, as it were, into the new neoliberal system that became dominant, and that, as we know well by now, steadily and systematically
widened the gap between the rich and the poor. The idea of integrating women (even feminists) into
local, regional, and national politics was part of the democratizing projects; the problem was that the
economic system these countries adopted (or were forced to adopt) was also hurting women in
massive numbers, and a number of democracies were especially weak as they ‘‘transitioned’’ out of the
dictatorships. In the case of countries that had been free of military dictatorships, given their
dependence on Western capitalism and generally weak national economies, they also had to pass
through the global politics of structural adjustment and neo-liberal ‘‘reform,’’ all of which exacerbated
class divisions among women, including those in the feminist movement. The problem of being
partially integrated into a system of power, let’s say, that rests on habits, if not ideologies, of
masculine dominance, and that still, whether directly or indirectly, exploits or marginalizes part of the
population, including women, is a terrible burden to face. It is not clear, in my view, that resisting
institutional participation, as advocated by an ‘‘autonomous’’ wing in the feminist movement, is the
solution. Much depends on the context in which participatory opportunities arise. In the end, feminists
sort themselves out according to their political beliefs. What I think does require mention in the context
of democratization is the degree to which power struggles can arise between and among women when
some attain positions of power and/or significant advantage over others. Here we go back to questions
of class privilege and to questions of ethnoracial or heterosexist privilege that play themselves out inside
the women’s and/or feminist movements (see Alvarez et al. 2002; Curiel 2007, 182–84). This is
problematic not only because such couplings of privilege and power perpetuate the deep class and
ethnoracial divisions characteristic of traditional (anti-democratic) societies, but because of the
resentment such forms of power can spread among the marginalized. Feminist politics, in this sense,
needs a feminist ethics to balance issues of power with issues of fairness, reciprocity, and justice.
The woman in latin societies is constructed from the male, forcing Latinas into a
subservient rule
Hernandez-Truyol 99 (Berta Esperanza, Professor of Law, St. John's University School of Law,
“INTER-GROUP SOLIDARITY: MAPPING THE INTERNAL/EXTERNAL DYNAMICS OF OPPRESSION: Latina
Multidimensionality and LatCrit Possibilities: Culture, Gender, and Sex”, Lexis) TYBG
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In his work El Laberinto de la Soledad, Octavio Paz captured the Latinos' image of woman: An
instrument, sometimes of masculine desires, sometimes of the ends assigned to her by morality,
society and the law... In a world made in man's image, woman is only a reflection of masculine will
and desire. When passive, she becomes goddess, a beloved one, a being who embodies the ancient,
stable elements of the universe: the earth, motherhood, virginity. When active, she is always function
and means, a receptacle/a vessel, a channel. Womanhood, unlike [*818] manhood, is never an end in
itself. n23 As the Paz passage depicts, the Latina is defined by the Latino from his dominant situation in
family, church and state. The Latina did not participate in or consent to the definition that determines
who she is or what she does. She is fabricated and sculpted in the image, desire, and fantasy of the
Latino. The cultural expectations/interpretations of Latinas, simply because of their sex, by the cultura
Latina tracks the dominant paradigm's con struction of sex. Man is the norm, woman in his image, an
afterthought -- lesser in every sense: strength, stature, ability. n24 The gendered imprinting occurs
starting at birth. Baby girls are dressed in pink, treated demurely, and adorned with jewels -- dormilonas
(literally "sleepers"), small posts in gold that decorate their tiny ears -- starting their designated route to
femininity. Little girls continue to be socialized to be feminine, prepared to be mothers and wives.
Their most important aspiration and achievement, is to get mar ried, have children, and serve their
families. n25 Should the family needs demand the Latina to work outside of the home, employment is
viewed as a means of continuing to serve the family. Since Latinas work for the family rather than for
personal satisfaction or gain, they pursue positions that replicate their "appropriate" conduct - those
"feminine" low- respect, arduous, thankless occupations as caretakers: nannies, cooks, maids, jobs at
the bottom of the pay scale (probably because they so well replicate their "natural" role as wife,
mother, housewife). n26 The cultura Latina, reflecting and incorporating its predominantly Catholic
religious foundation, fixates the idea of womanhood on the image of the Virgin Mary -- the paradoxical
virgin mother. n27 Latinas [*819] are glorified by the marianista paradigm as "strong, long-suffering
women who have endured and kept la cultura Latina and the family intact." n28 This model requires
that women dispense care and pleasure, but not receive the same; that they live in the shadows of
and be deferen tial to all the men in their lives: father, brother, son, husband, boy friend. n29
Perfection for a Latina is submission. Language and family are cultural constants throughout most of
Latinas' travels that unconsciously sometimes, subconsciously some times, and instinctively sometimes
define navigations and destinations, transitions and translations. n30 For Latinas these clear and rigid
delineations of the borderlands of proper conduct embed a male vision of culture, sex, and gender
identity. n31 This epistemology privileges the Latino master narrative and predefines and preordains the
content of and con text for Latinas' journeys. Thus family, society at large, community, church, and state
collude to limit and frustrate the daily travels that identify, define, and design the extent and
parameters of the viajera's tours. These cultural perspectives on proper sex/gender roles design Latinas'
lives and deeply affect their existence. This constitutive power of accepted narratives makes me
question why womanhood requires that I be submissive when I'm supposed to be revered (in the image
of the Virgin Mary); why I should love boys and see all men as superior if they are not trustworthy; and
why I should be deferential, servile, and subservient to men at home when I am supposed to be their
equal or better at work. Those of us who question or challenge the norm risk alienation from and
marginalization by our comunidad Latina rendering us outsiders even within the outsider comunidad
Latina. As the last portion of this essay addresses in the following section, sexuality is central to the
Latina subordinate position within family and community.
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The Latina perspective has been relegated to the periphery for centuries
Schutte 11 (Ofelia, Ph.D. in philosophy and Professor Emerita at University of Southern Florida,
"Engaging Latin American Feminisms Today: Methods, Theory, Practice." Hypatia 26.4 pgs. 785-786)
TYBG
In a recently published work, the Cuban-born philosopher (residing in Germany) Rau´l FornetBetancourt documents the ‘‘difficult relationship’’ between women and philosophy in the context of
Latin American thought dating back to the nineteenth century (Fornet-Betancourt 2009). Of course,
the difficulty of women’s access to philosophy and their ultimate recognition as philosophers dates
back much further than this, given the patriarchal and masculine-dominant features of earlier stages
of Western cultures, including its colonizing practices in the Americas. But during the postindependence period of national formation in Latin America, at a time when positivism was accepted as
the guiding ideology for national advancement and scientific progress, one can still notice either the
rejection of—or, at best, the ambivalence of the leading thinkers of the period toward—the
incorporation of women, as major writers and intellectuals, into the national culture. Fornet-Betancourt
documents what an informal review of the history and practice of Latin American thought (or
pensamiento latinoamericano) reveals even to this day: namely that, historically, the understanding of
the meanings given to Latin American culture has been articulated and handed down generation after
generation through the perspectives of educated men (in earlier and more traditional times known as
letrados, or ‘‘lettered’’), with little or any space provided for women’s visions of society or of social
liberation. Especially left out of consideration were those women who departed from or contested the
views of their prominent male contemporaries. To be fair to Latin American studies and philosophy, it
should be said that a similar problem occurs in other research fields, even in today’s climate of so-called
gender inclusiveness. For example, it is not unusual to find studies of colonialism and post-colonialism
highlighting issues of race, class, and cultural imperialism, without incorporating a comparable
constitutive epistemic category intended to address issues related to the construction of gender roles or
the critique of gender normativity. In short, even today (outside of feminist theory per se) the
consideration of gender issues often takes on an optional status, whereas issues of race, ethnicity,
class, or some other variable thought to be constitutive of colonialism are treated as defining the
epistemic frameworks for research.
Latina/o culture gendered
HERNANDEZ-TRUYOL 97 [72 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 882 (1997), BORDERS (EN)GENDERED: NORMATIVITIES,
LATINAS, AND A LATCRIT PARADIGM]
The cultura Latina, including its predominantly Catholic religious mandates, intrudes to aggravate
Latinas' gender subordination. The Latina identity is developed in the context of the "ideal woman"
fabricated in the mold of the Virgin Mary,92 a construct called marianismo that "glorifie[s] [Latinas] as
strong, long-suffering women who ha[ve] endured and kept Latino culture and the family intact."9
[M]arianismo defines the ideal role for woman. And what an ambitious role it is, taking as the model of
perfection the Virgin Mary herself. Marianismo is about sacred duty, self-sacrifice, and chastity. About
dispensing care and pleasure, not receiving them. About living in the shadows, literally and figuratively
of your menfather, boyfriend, husband, son-your kids, and your family. Aside from bearing children, the
marianista has much in common with ima monja de convento, a cloistered nun-but the order she enters
is marriage, and her groom is not Christ but an all too human male who instantly becomes the single
object of her devotion for a lifetime. ... [Miarianismo insists you live in a world which no longer exists
and which perpetuates a value system equating perfection with submission. Veneration may be the
reward tendered to la mujer buena, but in actuality you end up feeling more like a servant than a
subject for adoration. Indeed, the noble sacrifice of self (the ultimate expression of marianismo) is the
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force which has for generations prevented Hispanic women from even entertaining the notion of
personal validation. Yet such female subjugation is not only practiced today, it is-ironically--enforced by
women, handed down as written in stone by our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts! We have reduced
the mandates of marianismo to a set of iron-clad rules of behavior, ten commandments if you will.94
We are taught to be pulcra (pure) and passive; we are discouraged from activity and aggressiveness. We
also are taught early, and severely, the meaning of respeto (respect): we must be deferential to our
elders and all the men in our lives-fathers, brothers, husbandand ask permission for everything.95 In
sum, the Latina is supposed to be a self-sacrificing, virgin mother, a saint, superhuman. She is deemed a
failure, however, if in her humanness she fails by falling short of this super- and suprahuman religious
ideal. This mythical ideal Latina sharply contrasts with its better known counterpart: machismo, which
molds men as "cold, intellectual, rational, profound, strong, authoritarian, independent and brave."96
One recent book describes machismo as having a "dark side" [that] mandates that men have options,
and women have duties. It means that a man's place is en el mundo, in the world, and a woman's place
is en la casa, in the home. It means that your brother is praised for being ambitious, while you are
discouraged for that same quality. And it means that first your father, then your brothers, then your
husband give the orders and you obey them.97 In The Marta Paradox,98 two Latinas-one Cuban and one
Dominican, both holding doctorates and practicing in the mental health field in New York City,
predominantly within the Latina/o community- study Latinas. While such subject/object identification
would appear to be able to overcome the oppressions of both the dominant paradigm and the Latino
construction and subordination of sex, the authors' transparent internalization of the male dominant,
male identified, cultural perspective prevails. For example, they suggest that machismo-the cultural
construction of the he-man who is the dictator of norms at work, at play, at church, and at home, who
must be worshipped, obeyed, and deferred to by the esposa-can have a "light" side that should be
encouraged.99 This "machismo lite" has a man performing all the stereotypical roles-carrying heavy
packages for, ceding the best seat to, and opening doors for his dama.100 This caricatured male
conduct, labeled a good thing by the authors, pales only in comparison to the instructions they decree
to La- tinas. The authors direct Latinas to scheme coquettishly to evoke such protective behavior-carrying heavy bags, opening doors, and ceding good seats-in their men.101 In handing down these
commandments, the authors succeed in reinforcing culture-based, gendered stereotypes and roles.
With The Marta Paradox, educated, doctorateholding, Latina psychotherapists have "confirmed" that
Latinas who, every day, are bearing, raising, and educating children, keeping house, cooking meals, and
more likely than not also working outside the home, are simply too helpless to open doors, carry
packages, or deal with a bad seat at the movies. Tragically, the authors engage in the very Latinasubjugates-Latina conduct that they claim to loathe in their definition of marianismo. Such clear (and
plainly understood by all) gender role dichotomization in the cultura Latina has far reaching
repercussions. The male belongs in the public sphere and the female-at least the buena mujer-in the
private sphere. Public women-epitomized by whores-have defied the boundaries of their appropriate
place and are las mujeres malas who are not respectable and do not deserve or get respeto. La buena
mujer exists in the home and is to be a virgin until she gets married. Men, on the other hand, dominate
public discourse. Men go to work and are the family providers. They also have no (hetero)sexual
boundaries. Men are encouraged to engage in pre- (and extra-) marital conquests. 102 Indeed, they are
judged on the machismo scale in direct proportion to the extent of their sexual triumphs. The cultural
proscriptions imposed on Latinas have broad socioeconomic consequences. Latinas are the poorest of
any demographic group in the United States. 03 Even when circumstances require that they enter the
public sphere by joining the labor force, they pursue positions that replicate their "appropriate"
conduct-those "feminine" occupations as caretakers: nannies, cooks, maids, jobs at the bottom of the
pay scale (probably because they so well replicate their "natural" role as wife, mother, housewife). 0 4
This frontera interna also plays a critical role in maintaining las fronteras externas, the external borders,
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tall and impenetrable against Latinas' full membership in any community. For instance, when Latinas
pursue nontraditional jobs, the cultural mandates of respeto, selfabjection, passivity, and insecurity ill
prepare Latinas for success. Consider, for example, the effect of la cultura on Latina lawyers. On the one
hand, those who follow the cultural norm of docility will be deemed ill equipped to represent clients
properly. Conversely, those who defy the cultural shackles may be viewed by the male dominated and
identified establishment as loud, overly aggressive, and ill suited to be an advocate. 05 To read and
believe the myths, Latinas are a walking, talking stereotype: dependent, submissive, sentimental,
seductive, pretty, maternal, flirtatious, unstable, impulsive, soft, sweet, intuitive, cowardly, insecure,
passive, resigned, envious, weeping, modest, monogamous, faithful, homey, and hysterical.106 From a
Latina-feminist perspective, these gender-role caricatures, so firmly ingrained in culture that their
mythical character has transmogrified into absolute tradition and truths, are virtually impenetrable
barriers preventing any deconstruction of cultural gender roles. In turn, acceptance of stereotyped
images as the real Latina is a frontera in the way of Latinas' attainment of respeto and equality in any
society.
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Impacts
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All the bad things
Gendered structures of international relations and politics culminate in environmental
destruction, nuclear war, and extinction
Tickner 1992
(J. Ann Tickner, Professor of International Relations at USC. Gender in International Relations: Feminist
Perspectives on Achieving Global Security. 1992, http://www.ciaonet.org/book/tickner/)
In the modern West, women's activities have typically been associated with a devalued world of
reproduction and maintenance, while men's have been tied to what have been considered the more
elevated tasks of creating history and meaning. Yet all these activities are equally important for human well-being. History
and the construction of meaning help us to achieve the kind of security that comes from an understanding of who we are as individuals and as
citizens, while reproduction and maintenance are necessary for our survival. In
the discourse of international politics, however,
our national identities as citizens have been tied to the heroic deeds of warrior-patriots and our
various states' successful participation in international wars. This militarized version of national
identity has also depended on a devaluation of the identities of those outside the boundaries of the
state. Additionally, it has all but eliminated the experiences of women from our collective national
memories. A less militarized version of national identity, which would serve us better in the
contemporary world where advances in technology are making wars as dangerous for winners as for
losers, must be constructed out of the equally valued experiences of both women and men. To foster
a more peaceful world, this identity must also rest on a better understanding and appreciation of the
histories of other cultures and societies. The multidimensional nature of contemporary insecurities also highlights the
importance of placing greater public value on reproduction and maintenance. In a world where nuclear war could destroy
the earth and most of its inhabitants, we can no longer afford to celebrate the potential death of
hundreds of thousands of our enemies; the preservation of life, not its destruction, must be valued.
The elimination of structural violence demands a restructuring of the global economy so that
individuals' basic material needs take priority over the desire for profit. An endangered natural
environment points to the need to think in terms of the reproduction rather than the exploitation of
nature. This ethic of caring for the planet and its inhabitants has been devalued by linking it to the
private realm associated with the activities of women; yet caring and responsibility are necessary
aspects of all dimensions of life, public and private. They will be valued in the public realm only when men participate
equally in the private realm in tasks associated with maintenance and responsibility for child rearing. If we are to move toward a more secure
future, what we value in the public realm, including the realm of international politics, should not be so rigidly separated from the values we
espouse in the home.
Masculine conceptions of international relations cause the worst form of violence
including exploitation, environmental destruction, and militarism that results in
endless violence
Zalewski 1998 (Marysia Zalewski, Reader in the Centre for Women’s Studies, and Jane Parpart,
professor of Gender Studies at University of Dalhousie, 98 [The 'Man' Question in International
Relations, Westview Press, Boulder, p86])
Whereas we think it important to avoid what Halliday calls "precipitate totalization," 9 we also think it
worthwhile to recognize the very real connections between the domination of masculine paradigms in
intellectual debate, on the one hand, and personal insecurity in the late twentieth century, the
development of industrial capitalism, and ecological destruction, on the other. The recognition of
these connections is nothing new; both Peterson and Tickner unpackage IR in this way ( Peterson 1992,
32; Tickner 1992). However, the relation between these connections and the dispute between realist
and liberal forms of masculinity must also be recognized (see Chapter 1).
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The shift from hierarchical to spatial world orders that occurred after the Middle Ages created an
international realm in which the hypermasculinity of the warrior developed and finally flourished as
realist hypermasculinity within the discipline of international relations. The intellectual response to
conservatism from the Enlightenment produced a conception of reason that laid the foundations of the
"rational man" of the following centuries of capitalist development. Finally, the liberal conception of
progress as the natural outgrowth of increasing rationality produced the critical liberal conception of the
gradual mastery of man over nature. The consequences are readily itemizable: (1) realist
hypermasculinity is responsible for the emergence and eventual militarization of the state system with
its imagery of protector/protected, inside/outside, and order/anarchy--a situation in which security
for the few is bought at the cost of insecurity of the many ( Luckham 1983); (2) liberal masculinity's
notions of competition, individuality, and rational economic man has meant prosperity for the few
and exploitation of the many ( Wallerstein 1974; Amin 1974); (3) liberal conceptions of progress have
fostered a split between man and nature where nature is to be dominated and is consequently
responsible for the widespread degradation of the global environment ( Crosby 1986); (4) both liberal
and realist conceptions of masculinity have been responsible for the fostering of the belief in the
discovery of predictable regularities through which "science" can reveal eternal truths about "man"
and "nature." This has allowed (hu)manity to ignore the myriad warning signs of imminent
catastrophe ( Peterson 1992; Tickner 1992).
Privileging masculinity without recognizing the linkages between different types of
violence makes women’s oppression, war and domestic violence inevitable
Jill Steans, Senior Lecturer in International Relations Theory , Department of Political Science and
International Studies, University of Birmingham, Gender and International Relations: An Introduction,
1998 p. 101-102
Radical feminists claim that so long as the privileging of masculinity is inherent in the political system
women will face the consequences, while at the same time being seen as part of the ‘innocent’, the
‘weak’ and the ‘protected’. As such, ‘war’ for women will be inherent in the system. In this view, to
continue to draw an absolute distinction between war and other forms of male violence without
recognizing the linkages obscures the real problem, which is patriarchy. The links between domestic
violence and war go deeper than soldiers, brutalized by their experiences, beating their wives. Rather,
there is an intricate relationship between the construction of masculinity and patriotism and violence.
War and domestic violence are, in a symbolic but still meaningful sense, linked. Many radical feminist
thinkers involved in the peace movement believe that the insights that arise from women’s particular
relation to violence mean that issues of war, peace and security can be approached from a feminist
standpoint. That is, the particular experiences of women can be used as a point of departure from
which to construct an understanding of violence that makes gender central to the explanation, not
because of women’s ‘traditional roles’ or ‘essential biology’, but because women stand in a
relationship to violence which is unique among oppressed groups. Feminist peace activists claim that
for women the ‘oppressors’ are found among immediate family or lovers, and that terror for women is
the quiet pervasive ordinary terror which happens in the home.100 In this view, not only is war part of
women’s daily existence, but war, violence and women’s oppression all grow from the same root.
Military institutions and states are inseparable from patriarchy. War is not then, as realists and neorealists would hold, rooted in the nature of ‘man’ or the anarchy of the international realm. However,
the hegemony of a dominance-orientated masculinity sets the dynamics of the social relations in which
alLare forced to participate. Some feminists argue that patriarchal societies have an inherent proclivity
towards war because of the supreme value placed on control and the natural male tendency towards
displays of physical force.101 Though primarily concerned with the discourse of war, politics and
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citizenship, Hartsock argues that the association of power with masculinity and virility has very real
consequences. She argues that ‘it gives rise to a view of community both in theory and in fact
obsessed with the revenge and structured by conquest and domination’102 Furthermore, according to
Hartsock, the opposition of man to woman and perhaps even man to man is not simply a transitory
opposition of arbitrary interests, but an opposition resting on a deep-going threat to existence. She
argues that we re-encounter in the context of gender, as in class, the fact that the experience of the
ruling group, or gender, cannot be simply dismissed as false.103 This raises the question of how we
conceptualize and understand not only the ‘patriarchal state’, but also the relationship between the
patriarchal nation-state requiring in the context of competitive struggle with other states militarism and
internal hierarchy.’04
The ultimate impact is extinction—the dysfunctionality of patriarchy guarantees
continued violence, war, and environmental destruction, making any impact
inevitable. Only moving away from this system can create opportunities for survival.
Karen Warren and Duane Cady, Professors of Philosophy at Macalester College and Hamline
University. “Feminism and Peace: Seeking Connections.” Hypatia. Vol. 9, Iss. 2; pg. 4 Spring 1994
Proquest
The notion of patriarchy as a socially dysfunctional system enables feminist philosophers to show why
conceptual connections are so important and how conceptual connections are linked to the variety of
other sorts of woman-nature-peace connections. In addition, the claim that patriarchy is a dysfunctional
social system locates what ecofeminists see as various "dysfunctionalities" of patriarchy-the empirical
invisibility of what women do, sexist-warist-naturist language, violence toward women, other cultures,
and nature-in a historical, socioeconomic, cultural, and political context.(10) To say that patriarchy is a
dysfunctional system is to say that the fundamental beliefs, values, attitudes and assumptions
(conceptual framework) of patriarchy give rise to impaired thinking, behaviors, and institutions which
are unhealthy for humans, especially women, and the planet. The following diagram represents the features of
patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system: Patriarchy, as an Up-Down system of power-over relationships of domination of women by men, is
conceptually grounded in a faulty patriarchal belief and value system, (a), according to which (some) men are rational and women are not
rational, or at least not rational in the more highly valued way (some) men are rational; reason and mind are more important than emotion and
body; that humans are justified in using female nature simply to satisfy human consumptive needs. The discussion above of patriarchal
conceptual frameworks describes the characteristics of this faulty belief system. Patriarchal conceptual frameworks sanction, maintain, and
perpetuate impaired thinking, (b): For example, that men can control women's inner lives, that it is men's role to determine women's choices,
that human superiority over nature justifies human exploitation of nature, that women are closer to nature than men because they are less
rational, more emotional, and respond in more instinctual ways than (dominant) men. The discussions above at (4) and (5), are examples of the
linguistic and psychological forms such impaired thinking can take. Operationalized, the
evidence of patriarchy as a
dysfunctional system is found in the behaviors to which it gives rise, (c), and the unmanageability, (d),
which results. For example, in the United States, current estimates are that one out of every three or
four women will be raped by someone she knows; globally, rape, sexual harassment, spouse-beating,
and sado-masochistic pornography are examples of behaviors practiced, sanctioned, or tolerated
within patriarchy. In the realm of environmentally destructive behaviors, strip-mining, factory
farming, and pollution of the air, water, and soil are instances of behaviors maintained and
sanctioned within patriarchy. They, too, rest on the faulty beliefs that it is okay to "rape the earth,"
that it is "man's God-given right" to have dominion (that is, domination) over the earth, that nature
has only instrumental value, that environmental destruction is the acceptable price we pay for
"progress." And the presumption of warism, that war is a natural, righteous, and ordinary way to
impose dominion on a people or nation, goes hand in hand with patriarchy and leads to dysfunctional
behaviors of nations and ultimately to international unmanageability. Much of the current
"unmanageability" of contemporary life in patriarchal societies, (d), is then viewed as a consequence of
a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events, and experiences that reflect historically male-gender-
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identified beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions. Included among these real-life consequences are
precisely those concerns with nuclear proliferation, war, environmental destruction, and violence
toward women, which many feminists see as the logical outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is
often only through observing these dysfunctional behaviors--the symptoms of dysfunctionality--that one
can truly see that and how patriarchy serves to maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is
understood as a dysfunctional system, this "unmanageability" can be seen for what it is--as a
predictable and thus logical consequence of patriarchy.(11) The theme that global environmental
crises, war, and violence generally are predictable and logical consequences of sexism and patriarchal
culture is pervasive in ecofeminist literature (see Russell 1989, 2). Ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak, for
instance, argues that "a militarism and warfare are continual features of a patriarchal society because
they reflect and instill patriarchal values and fulfill needs of such a system. Acknowledging the context
of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first step toward reducing their impact and
preserving life on Earth" (Spretnak 1989, 54). Stated in terms of the foregoing model of patriarchy as a
dysfunctional social system, the claims by Spretnak and other feminists take on a clearer meaning:
Patriarchal conceptual frameworks legitimate impaired thinking (about women, national and regional
conflict, the environment) which is manifested in behaviors which, if continued, will make life on
earth difficult, if not impossible. It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility lies in
understanding the conceptual roots of various woman-nature-peace connections in regional, national,
and global contexts.
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Anethical
The epistemology of traditional international relations divorces ethics from politics by
relegating ethical considerations to the feminine banished from public political action
– allowing for the worst violence in history.
Pandey 2006 (Anupam, thesis submitted to faculty of graduate studies and research in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctorate of philosophy department of political science
Carleton university, forging bonds with women, nature and the third world: an ecofeminist critique of
international relations, proquest) <103-105>
Both traditional IR theory and its positivist basis have been soundly criticized for their shortcomings by
post-positivist approaches such as feminist, post-modern, poststructuralist and critical approaches. This
research aims to extend and deepen the existing critique by developing an ecofeminist perspective. A
short summation of the post- positivist critique of the neo-realist agenda in this regard lies in the fact
that the problem is inherent in the epistemological premises of the school itself. The subject-object
dichotomy is responsible for the divorce of ethics from theory. That theorizing helps to construct the
reality and the need for epistemological self-consciousness cannot be emphasized enough. “We don’t
see things as they are, we see them as we are” (Ken Booth quoting Anais, 1995: 334).
As discussed earlier, the most critical aspect with respect to epistemology and methodology is the
hidden element of power associated with it. Robert Cox’s famous statement that theory is always to
benefit someone or for some purpose (1986: 207) is equally true for epistemology. The adoption of a
particular epistemological choice (which we discussed leads to serious ontological consequences for the
discipline which in turn, in constitutive of reality) cannot be an innocent exercise. Thus, the
fundamental question that arises is just whose perspective is reflected in the choice of method or
even epistemology or quite simply, who is the “knower”? The answer to this question with respect to
International Relations and its scientific methods and positivistic methodology is that the subject is
clearly the male who represents the White, western, Bourgeois masculinity. Alternately, an
ecofeminist epistemology is reflective of the subjectivity or perspective of the epistemology of the
voiceless, the dispossessed and the marginalized, specifically, women and nature and it explores the
relationship between the two. As discussed in detail in chapter 2, in this regard, much of what an
ecofeminist critique promises is already covered by a feminist standpoint epistemology. Not only does
the latter help to reveal the element of power in the construction of knowledge by specifying exactly
who stands to benefit from such knowledge but it also helps to reverse the hierarchical order by
developing an epistemology from the standpoint of the oppressed, namely, women. However, an
ecofeminist perspective serves to expand the existing body of knowledge by shifting the focus away
not only from androcentricism but even anthropocentricism. This shift in focus is the key to
understanding hierarchization, inegalitarianism and exploitation in relationships between humans.
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Nuclear War
Subordination of women to men makes global nuclear war inevitable.
Betty Reardon, Director, Peace Education Program, Columbia. Women and Peace. Pg. 30-31 1993
A clearly visible element in the escalating tensions among militarized nations is the macho posturing
and the patriarchal ideal of domination, not parity, which motivates defense ministers and
government leaders to “strut their stuff” as we watch with increasing horror. Most men in our
patriarchal culture are still acting out old patterns that are radically inappropriate for the nuclear age.
To prove dominance and control, to distance one’s character from that of women, to survive the
toughest violent initiation, to shed the sacred blood of the hero, to collaborate with death in order to
hold it at bay all of these patriarchal pressures on men have traditionally reached resolution in ritual
fashion on the battlefield. But there is no longer any battlefield. Does anyone seriously believe that if a
nuclear power were losing a crucial large-scale conventional war it would refrain from using its nuclear
war missiles because of some diplomatic agreement? The military theater of a nuclear exchange today
would extend instantly or eventually to all living things, all the air, all the soil, all the water. If we
believe that war is a “necessary evil,” that patriarchal assumptions are simply “human nature,” then
we are locked into a lie, paralyzed. The ultimate result of unchecked terminal patriarchy will be
nuclear holocaust.
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Structural Violence
Their starting point erases sexual violence
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
It is by now well-documented that sexual and physical violence against women increases as a direct
result of armed conflict. The large scale rape of women, for example, has been a military strategy in
countless historical and recent conflicts. 7 2 The causes of armed conflict are often linked with attempts
to control economic resources such as oil, metal, diamonds, drugs or contested territorial boundaries.73
Violence against women may be one way to achieve this control and extraction of resources as the
Ugandan epigraph highlights.74 Risk of violence is particularly acute for refugee and internally
displaced women and girls (IDPs) in conflict situations. Women in refugee and IDP camps lack privacy
and may be forced to live in the same quarters or in close proximity to male strangers, which decreases
their security. Studies show a high level of sexual violence in and around these camps. Moreover, once
the conflict has ended, women who are repatriated often no longer have houses or land to return to.
This is due to a number of reasons, including destruction, their forced relocation to a different part of
the country, discriminatory inheritance laws, lack of proper property titles, and secondary Poor rural
women, IDPs and refugee women, and women living in conflict zones are at risk of violence in their
efforts to provide food for themselves and their families. 76 Many women are raped and abused
while seeking basic necessities such as water, food and firewood for cooking. This violence is
perpetrated by local civilians, gangs, soldiers and other armed groups. In Sudan, rapes and other forms
of sexual abuse have been frequently reported when displaced women and girls leave camp areas to
gather firewood. 17 Lack of access to income sources has forced displaced women to collect firewood in
the Kieni forest of Kenya, where they are reported to be subjected to abuse, including sexual abuse and
severe beatings. 'Sexual violence against displaced women collecting fuel has become so common that
camp workers in Darfur have abbreviated the phenomenon to "firewood rape".' 7 During displacement,
women are often forced to 'pay' for food with sex: 'Demands for sexual services sometimes constitute
an informal 'currency' in which bribes are paid. Examples range from rape and assault by service
providers to sexual harassment and psychological abuse'.79 'In Liberia, displaced women have been
forced to exchange sex for aid, including food from national and international peace workers,
according to a report by Save the Children.80 Internally displaced women are vulnerable to violence as
a result of their economic resources being stripped from them during the displacement and their lack
of access to economic resources afterward. They remain economically disadvantaged decades after
the displacement. There are reports as well that displaced women fleeing their homes or living in IDP
camps have sometimes been forced into prostitution in order to survive or have fallen prey to
traffickers81
Current international relations perpetuate structural violence
Blanchard 03 (Eric, PhD in Political Science from University of Southern California and American
Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellow, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development
of Feminist Security Theory”, http://people.reed.edu/~ahm/Courses/Reed-POL-240-2012S1_IP/Syllabus/EReadings/05.1/05.1.zFurther_Blanchard2003Gender.pdf, pg. 1297-98)
In Gender in International Relations, Tickner introduces an important theme of FST: the recognition of
structural violence, a term borrowed from peace research (Galtung 1971), which she uses to designate
the economic and environmental “insecurity of individuals whose life expectancy was reduced, not by
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the direct violence of war but by domestic and international structures of political and economic
oppression” (Tickner 1992, 69). Peterson claims that a feminist rethinking of security must first inquire
into how structural violence comes to be understood as natural and unproblematic and then work to
politicize and reveal the historically contingent nature of such structures (1992a, 49). While women
have long been peripheral to the decision-making processes of global capital, the international
political economy can render women insecure through the gendered division of labor, the discounting
of work in the home, the dictates of structural adjustment programs, the ravages of poverty, and the
violence of sexual tourism and trafficking in women—all issues that generally do not get the attention
of orthodox practitioners of IR (see Pettman 1996). Likewise, although the care of the environment, a
transnational issue requiring collective action, is not a priority of IR theories that privilege the power and
instrumental rationality of nation-states, Tickner contends that feminist configurations of security must
take note of the need for global economic restructuring and urge a shift from the exploitation of
nature to the reproduction of nature (1992). Such a global restructuring might start with the
recognition that environmental degradation is not gender neutral; women are affected
disproportionately by environmental insecurity, “especially in developing countries where the link
between poverty, women’s status (or lack thereof), imposed development policies, and environmental
degradation is a complex but intense one” (Elliot 1996, 16).
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Environment
Maintaining flawed conceptions of gender allows for the continuance of the logic of
domination – all systems of oppression are interlinked and without attempting to
change our conception of gender ecological and social crisis will be inevitable
Cuomo 2002 (Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Cincinnati,
2002 (Chris, Ethics & the Environment, p.3)
I take that phrase “power and promise,” an unusually optimistic measure for anything in the
contemporary discipline of philosophy, from the title of Karen Warren’s widely-read and often reprinted
1991 essay, “The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism.” That essay includes an argument that is
basic to Warren’s Ecofeminist Philosophy, and that is commonly characterized as the fundamental
insight of ecofeminism. The view argued for is that a “logic of domination” that divides the world into
bifurcated hierarchies is basic to all forms of oppression and domination. This logic (which Warren also
calls a “conceptual framework”) is a way of thinking that encourages separating from and mistreating
nature and members of subordinated groups, for no good reason. In addition, the conceptual
frameworks that are used to justify racism, sexism, and the mistreatment of nature (etc.), are
interwoven and mutually reinforcing. Some ecofeminists find that the very aspects of identity and
otherness (gender, race, class, species, etc.) are created through conceptual frameworks that encourage
domination rather than connection, but Warren remains agnostic about such ontological issues. Her
emphasis instead is on a more basic point - that the morally loaded concepts through which we
understand ourselves and reality (and through which “we” humans have historically constructed
knowledge) are at the core of the terrible ecological and social messes we currently face.
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Objectification
Attempts to ignore the otherworldly are just symptoms of white heterosexual
rationality that can only lead to objectification and is the root of all violence
Anzaldúa 87 (Gloria. M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin and leading
scholar in Chicano cultural theory and Queer theory. Borderlands, la frontera: the new mestiza. Pgs 3637. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. eBook. JMR)
Like many Indians and Mexicans, I did not deem my psychic experiences real. I denied their
occurrences and let my inner senses atrophy. I allowed white rationality to tell me that the existence
of the "other world" was mere pagan superstition. I accepted their reality, the "official" reality of the
rational, reasoning mode which is condemned with external reality , the upper world, and is
considered the most developed consciousness-the consciousness of duality. The other mode of
consciousness facilitates images from the soul and the unconscious through dreams and the
imagination. Its work is labeled "fiction," make-believe, wish-fulfillment. White anthropologists claim
that Indians have "primitive" and therefore deficient minds that we cannot think in the higher mode
of consciousness-rationality. They are fascinated by what they call the "magical" mind, the "savage"
mind, the participation mystique of the mind that says the world of the imagination-the world of the
soul-and of the spirit is just as real as physical reality.32 In trying to become "objective," Western
culture made "objects" of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing
"touch" with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence . Not only was the brain split into two
functions but so was reality. Thus, people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface
between 'the two forced to become adept at switching modes. Such is the case with the india and the
mestiza.
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Structural Violence First
Structural violence is a form of ongoing and growing genocide that kills more people
each year than all the wars combined. In fact, genocide from structural violence even
outweighs a hypothetical nuclear war.
Gilligan 96 [James, Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Director of the Center for
the Study of Violence, and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the National Campaign
Against Youth Violence, “Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and its Causes”, p. 191-196]
The deadliest form of violence is poverty. You cannot work for one day with the violent people who fill
our prisons and mental hospitals for the criminally insane without being forcible and constantly
reminded of the extreme poverty and discrimination that characterizes their lives. Hearing about their
lives, and about their families and friends, you are forced to recognize the truth in Gandhi’s observation
that the deadliest form of violence is poverty. Not a day goes by without realizing that trying to
understand them and their violent behavior in purely individual terms is impossible and wrong-headed.
Any theory of violence, especially a psychological theory, that evolves from the experience of men in
maximum security prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane must begin with the recognition that
these institutions are only microcosms. They are not where the major violence in our society takes
place, and the perpetrators who fill them are far from being the main causes of most violent deaths.
Any approach to a theory of violence needs to begin with a look at the structural violence in this
country. Focusing merely on those relatively few men who commit what we define as murder could
distract us from examining and learning from those structural causes of violent death that are far
more significant from a numerical or public health, or human, standpoint. By “structural violence” I
mean the increased rates of death, and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of
society, as contrasted with the relatively low death rates experienced by those who are above them.
Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of class
structure; and that structure itself is a product of society’s collective human choices, concerning how to
distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting “structural”
with “behavioral violence,” by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by
specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to
homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. Structural violence differs from
behavior violence in at least three major respects. *The lethal effects of structural violence operate
continuously, rather than sporadically, whereas murders, suicides, executions, wars, and other forms
of behavior violence occur one at a time. *Structural violence operates more or less independently of
individual acts; independent of individuals and groups (politicians, political parties, voters) whose
decisions may nevertheless have lethal consequences for others. *Structural violence is normally
invisible, because it may appear to have had other (natural or violent) causes. [CONTINUED] The finding
that structural violence causes far more deaths than behavioral violence does is not limited to this
country. Kohler and Alcock attempted to arrive at the number of excess deaths caused by
socioeconomic inequities on a worldwide basis. Sweden was their model of the nation that had come
closest to eliminating structural violence. It had the least inequity in income and living standards, and
the lowest discrepancies in death rates and life expectancy; and the highest overall life expectancy of
the world. When they compared the life expectancies of those living in the other socioeconomic
systems against Sweden, they found that 18 million deaths a year could be attributed to the “structural
violence” to which the citizens of all the other nations were being subjected. During the past decade,
the discrepancies between the rich and poor nations have increased dramatically and alarmingly. The 14
to 19 million deaths a year caused by structural violence compare with about 100,000 deaths per year
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from armed conflict. Comparing this frequency of deaths from structural violence to the frequency of
those caused by major military and political violence, such as World War II (an estimated 49 million
military and civilian deaths, including those by genocide – or about eight million per year, 1939-1945),
the Indonesian massacre of 1965-66 (perhaps 575,000 deaths), the Vietnam war (possibly two million,
1954-1973), and even a hypothetical nuclear exchange between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (232
million), it is clear that even war cannot begin to compare with structural violence, which continues
year after year. In other words, every fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of
relative poverty as would be killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year period. This is, in
effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, and accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide,
perpetrated on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. Structural
violence is also the main cause of behavioral violence on a socially and epidemiologically significant
scale (from homicide and suicide to war and genocide). The question as to which of the two forms of
violence – structural or behavioral – is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are
inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.
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Framework/Alt
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Alt – Gendered Epistemology Key
The knowledge production of the affirmative is gendered, this contributes to gendered
practices in politics and economics. Their attempt to depoliticize gender domination
guarantees that women are treated as objects, not subjects.
Youngs 4
(Gillian Youngs is a Lecturer at the Center for Mass Communication Research at the University of
Leicester, “Feminist International Relations: A Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women and Gender Are
Essential to Understanding the World 'We' Live in”, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International
Affairs 1944-), Vol. 80, No. 1, January, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3569295)
The title of Charlotte Hooper's influential book Manly states: masculinities international relations and
gender politics can usefully be read as a play on words that reflects the two levels of ontological
revisionism.'3 'Manly states' is a description both of the masculinist nature of states, traditionally the
central actors in international relations, and of the general conditions (states) of manliness, otherwise
the problem (as feminist International Relations would term it) of masculinity and masculine
subjectivity. Critique of the masculinist nature of states has inevitably been one of the richest and most
important threads of feminist International Relations, building, to some extent on, and certainly in close
relationship to, the insights of feminist political theory.'4 Let us for simplicity's sake take the
masculinist nature of states as referring to the historical problem of politics as male-defined and maledominated,15 and the problem of masculine subjectivity as a constrained and particularistic
articulation of political agency at the individual level. While mainstream International Relations has
tended to treat the state largely as a coherent (male-controlled) unit, feminist International Relations
has assessed at length the implications of its gendered realities,i6 expressed through the 'public over
private' hierarchy (sexual contract) that has traditionally framed politics (and economics) as
predominantly public spheres of male influence and identification, and the home, family and social
reproduction as predominantly private spheres of female influence and identification. The history of
state formation and identity is therefore one of gendered (and other forms of) oppression. 'As a
historical matter, early state formation marked the effective centralization of political authority and
accumulation processes, institutionalization of gender and class exploitation, and ideological
legitimation of these transformations. At least since Aristotle, the codification of man as "master"
[subject] and woman as "matter" [object] has powerfully naturalized/ de-politicized man's
exploitation of women, other men, and nature.'17 In its range of critical work on the state, feminist
International Relations has, directly and indirectly, accused mainstream International Relations of
depoliticizing exploitation by ignoring the relational gender dynamics integral to the political power of
states as (masculinist) actors. This work makes it clear that male power can and should be explained,
not just taken as given; that the state as a paramount expression of collective and historically and
socially constructed male power can and should be explained in dynamic gender terms, not taken as
given. The implication of such work is that the appearance of coherent masculinist power as evidenced
at the collective (state) or individual level is a surface or superficial perspective. Beneath it lies the
complex of gendered and other power relations that sustain it and, importantly, explain it. Thus,
feminist International Relations could be characterized as seeking to explain the fuller dynamics of
political and economic power that lie beneath the masculinist surface. A reflection by Steve Smith
emphasizes, in this context, the importance of gender as a relational concept: 'The most productive
focus is on gender, not women or feminism, because only this focus allows the examination of
precisely the construction of identities in IR that shape what happens to actual women and men in
IR.'I8 It is essential to add to this that, historically, feminist theory and analysis have been the spheres of
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critique and knowledge-building that have led the way in championing, explaining and validating
attention to gender as a category. As Charlotte Hooper has usefully summarized: 'One of the
achievements of feminist contributions to international relations has been to reveal the extent to
which the whole field is gendered. The range of subjects studied, the boundaries of the discipline, its
central concerns and motifs, the content of emnpirical research, the assumptions of theoretical
models, and the corresponding lack of female practitioners both in academic and elite political and
economic circles all combine and reinforce each other to marginalize and often make invisible
women's roles and women's concerns in the international arena.'"9 Hooper highlights here the
intimate interconnections between theory and practice in reproducing gendered realities, and thus
the role of mainstream International Relations in maintaining what might be viewed as superficial
rather than deep assessments of the nature of both states and political agency.
The alternative is to reject the affirmative’s knowledge production in favor of
examining politics through a gendered lens.
Tickner 1997
(J. Ann Tickner - Professor in the School of International Relations at University of Southern California,
President of the International Studies Association, the most respected and widely known scholarly
association in this field - Dec., 1997 “You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between
Feminists and IR Theorists” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4.)
Many of these issues seem far removed from the concerns of international relations. But, employing bottom-up rather than
top-down explanations, feminists claim that the operation of the global economy and states' attempts to
secure benefits from it are built on these unequal social relations between women and men which work
to the detriment of women's (and certain men's) security. For example, states that successfully compete in attracting
multinational corporations often do so by promising them a pool of docile cheap labor consisting of
young unmarried women who are not seen as "breadwinners" and who are unlikely to organize to protest working conditions and
low wages (Enloe, 1990: 151-76). When states are forced to cut back on government spending in order to comply with structural adjustment
programs, it is often the expectation that women, by virtue of their traditional role as care-givers, will perform the welfare tasks previously
assumed by the state without remuneration. According to Caroline Moser (1 99 1 : 105), structural adjustment programs
dedicated to
economic "efficiency" are built on the assumption of the elasticity of women's unpaid labor. In presenting some
feminist perspectives on security and some explanations for insecurity, I have demonstrated how feminists are challenging
levels of analysis and boundaries between inside and outside which they see, not as discrete constructs
delineating boundaries between anarchy and order, but as contested and mutually constitutive of one
another. Through a reexamination of the state, feminists demonstrate how the unequal social relations on which
most states are founded both influence their external security-seeking behavior and are influenced by
it. Investigating states as gendered constructs is not irrelevant to understanding their security- seeking
behaviors as well as whose interests are most served by these behaviors. Bringing to light social structures that support
war and "naturalize" the gender inequalities manifested in markets and households is not irrelevant for
understanding their causes. Feminists claim that the gendered foundations of states and markets must be
exposed and challenged before adequate understandings of, and prescriptions for, women's (and certain
men's) security broadly defined can be formulated.
Rethinking globalization from a feminist framework solves
Mohanty 2003 [Chandra Talpade. professor of Women's and Gender Studies, "'Under Western Eyes'
Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles." Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture &
Society 28.2 (2003): 499.]
Drawing on Arif Dirlik’s notion of “place consciousness as the radical other of global capitalism” (1999),
Grace Lee Boggs makes an important argument for place-based civic activism that illustrates how
centralizing thestruggles of marginalized communities connects to larger antiglobalization struggles.
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Boggs suggests that “place consciousness . . . encourages us to come together around common, local
experiences and organize around our hopes for the future of our communities and cities. While global
capitalism doesn’t give a damn about the people or the natural environment of any particular place
because it can always move on to other people and other places, place-based civic activism is concerned
about the health and safety of people and places” (Boggs 2000, 19). Since women are central to the life
of neighborhood and communities they assume leadership positions in these struggles. This is evident in
the example of women of color in struggles against environmental racism in the United States, as well as
in Shiva’s example of tribal women in the struggle against deforestation and for an intellectual
commons. It is then the lives, experiences, and struggles of girls and women of the Two-Thirds World
that demystify capitalism in its racial and sexual dimensions—and that provide productive and
necessary avenues of theorizing and enacting anticapitalist resistance. I do not wish to leave this
discussion of capitalism as a generalized site without contextualizing its meaning in and through the lives
it structures. Disproportionately, these are girls’ and women’s lives, although I am committed to the
lives of all exploited peoples. However, the specificity of girls’ and women’s lives encompasses the
others through their particularized and contextualized experiences. If these particular gendered,
classed, and racialized realities of globalization are unseen and under- theorized, even the most
radical critiques of globalization effectively render Third World/South women and girls as absent.
Perhaps it is no longer simply an issue of Western eyes, but rather how the West is inside and
continually reconfigures globally, racially, and in terms of gender. Without this recognition, a
necessary link between feminist scholarship/analytic frames and organizing/activist projects is
impossible. Faulty and inadequate analytic frames engender ineffective political action and
strategizing for social transformation. What does the above analysis suggest? That we—feminist
scholars and teachers—must respond to the phenomenon of globalization as an urgent site for the
recolonization of peoples, especially in the Two-Thirds World. Globalization colonizes women’s as well
as men’s lives around the world, and we need an anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and contextualized
feminist project to expose and make visible the various, overlapping forms of subjugation of women’s
lives. Activists and scholars must also identify and reenvision forms of collective resistance that women,
especially, in their different communities enact in their everyday lives. It is their particular exploitation
at this time, their potential epistemic privilege, as well as their particular forms of solidarity that can
be the basis for reimagining a liberatory politics for the start of this century.
We must employ a feminist political economy method—current economic structures
perpetuate patterns of violence
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
Patterns of violence against women from the home to the transnational realm are structurally linked
to patterns of global transformation instigated by economic, political, military and natural
environmental forces. This article has sought to highlight rather than comprehensively analyse some
strategic sites where we can see global processes such as neoliberal economic policies, armed conflict,
natural disasters and other crises, as well as reconstruction efforts, implicated in reinforcing existing
gender inequalities and created new forms of marginalisation and violence against women For
scholars, advocates and policymakers who seek to end violence against women, the lack of analysis of
the political economic processes that shape and perpetuate gender-based violence worldwide is
deeply troubling. Employing a feminist political economy method, the outlines of which I have
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suggested here, reveals the destabilisation brought about by economic globalisation and neoliberal
policies promulgated by states and international institutions and how they exacerbate violence
against women. Women's experiences of violence and abuse are shown to be intertwined with the
feminisation of poverty, transnational labour exploitation, trade liberalisation, limitations on their
sexual and reproductive rights, and control of their mobility. Feminist political economy analysis,
although undertaken only at a general level here, should make us skeptical that current global
initiatives, such as the UN 'UNITE' Campaign to end violence against women by 2015 and the UN
Security Council Resolutions on women, peace and security, will have a significant impact on
eradicating violence against women. While these international initiatives remain disconnected from
the larger transnational struggle for social and economic equality, they will most likely fail to achieve
this goal. Nancy Fraser has argued that the emancipatory promise of feminism depends on our
'reconnecting struggles against personalised subjection to the critique of a capitalist system'. 1 00 She
entices feminists to 'think big' by bringing back and integrating feminist political economy with
cultural critique101 This article and the larger book project of which it is a part, aim to contribute to
that rejoining of critical, feminist interdisciplinary analysis to address the deep-rooted structural causes
and consequences of violence against women. If ending violence against women globally is one of the
key struggles of our age, then we should do nothing less than marshal the best feminist-informed
analysis to interpret and to transform the causes of this violence.
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Alt – Latina Analysis Key
We must expose the racialized gendered violence that structures Latina experience to
solve value to life
Anzaldúa, Chicana cultural theorist and feminist, 1987
[Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 83-84, MM]
"You're nothing but a woman" means you are defective. Its opposite is to be un macho. The modern
meaning of the word "machismo," as well as the concept, is actually an Anglo invention. For men like
my father, being "macho" meant being strong enough to protect and support my mother and us, yet
being able to show love. Today's macho has doubts about his ability to feed and protect his family. His
“machismo” is an adaption to oppression and poverty and low self-esteem. It is the result of
hierarchical male dominance. The Anglo, feeling inadequate and inferior and powerless, displaces or
transfers these feelings to the Chicano by shaming him. In the Gringo world, the Chicano suffers from
excessive humility and self-effacement, shame of self and self-deprication. Around Latinos he suffers
from a sense of language inadequacy and its accompanying discomfort; with Native Americans he
suffers from a racial amnesia which ignores our common blood, and from guilt because the Spanish part
of him took their land and oppressed them. He has an excessive compensatory hubris when around
Mexicans from the other side. It overlays a deep sense of racial shame. The loss of a sense of dignity
and respect in the macho Breeds a false machismo which leads him to put down women and even to
brutalize them. Coexisting with his sexist behavior is a love for the mother which takes precedence
over that of all others. Devoted son, macho pig. To wash down the shame of his acts, of his very being,
and to handle the brute in the mirror, he takes to the bottle, the snort, the needle, and the fist.
Though we "understand" the root causes of maIe hatred and fear, and the subsequent wounding of
women, we do not excuse, we do not condone, and we will no longer put up with it. From the men of
our race, we demand the admission/acknowledgement/disclosure/testimony that they wound us,
violate us, are afraid of us and of our power. We need them to say they will begin to eliminate their
hurtful put-down ways. But more than the words, we demand acts. We say to them: We will develop
equal power with you and those who have shamed us. It is imperative that Mestizas support each
other in changing the sexist elements in the Mexican-Indian culture. As long as woman is put down, the
Indian and the Black in all of us is put down. The struggle of the mestiza is above all a feminist one.
As long as los hombres think they have to chingar mujeres and each other to be men, as long as men are
taught that they are superior and therefore culturally favored over la mujer, as long as to be a vieja is a
thing of derision, there can be no real healing of our psyches. We're halfway there - we have such love
of the Mother, the good mother. The first step is to unlearn the puta/virgen dichotomy and to see
Coatlapopeuh-Coatlicue in the Mother, Guadalupe.
Must critique the gendered dimensions of Latin American culture
HERNANDEZ-TRUYOL 97 [72 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 882 (1997), BORDERS (EN)GENDERED: NORMATIVITIES,
LATINAS, AND A LATCRIT PARADIGM]
Latinas provide a tremendous challenge to the development of a constructive, nonessentialist model.
As multiple-layered outsiders, Latinas have been completely olvidadas by the normative structure, in
the context of which they constitute far too many deviations from the norm to be manageable in a
legal theory universe that looks at one layer of self at a time. 1 2 Latinas, even the most "normativas"
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among them, differ from the neutral, legal, founding-father-look-alike ideal of the (allegorical)
reasonable man in sex (meaning gender), race/ ethnicity, and culture-not to mention that, statistically
speaking, most Latinas will also deviate in terms of language, religion, socioeconomic class, and
education.113 The concept of "the straight white Christian man of property [as] the ethical universal
114 is otherworldly to the Latina. Latinas' multiple exclusions, to date not considered in discourse,
have resulted in barriers to Latinas from actively participating in any of their communities-both the
"external" so-called "American" community as well as the comunidad Latina-and thus they have been
denied visibility, the power to speak, and the potential to be heard. To include Latinas, a LatCrit
paradigm must incorporate an internationalist, globalized, feminist, multi/cross-cultural perspective.
Such a nonessentialist model brings to the center of discourse the amalgam of Latinas' identities,
including race, ethnicity, nationhood, gender, and culture, and will prevent Latinas' exclusion. In
addition, because of the subordinating effect to Latinas of our internal relationship to la cultura Latina, a
LatCrit paradigm must be sensitive to and develop a roadmap regarding the consideration of culture. In
this regard, however, the model also must be careful not to replicate, inadvertently, any of the
subjugating effects of the external relationship of the dominant culture to the cultura Latina. Thus, there
are two applications and interpretations of cultural conservation that the LatCrit model must avoid.
One is the use of culture as a shield by the elite within the cultura Latina with the desire, purpose, and
consequence of keeping Latinas invisible, nonexistent, and disempowered. The other is the use of
culture as a sword by a dominant group to eviscerate and subordinate the cultura Latina, or a variant
of it, as foreign to, and outside of, the normative mold. In other words, LatCrit must avert the mis/use
of the protection of culture so as to perpetuate women's subordination in the name of tradition, or to
subordinate nondominant subcultures in the name of lawboth perfidious results. In the context of
cultural considerations, LatCrit theorizing must support and promote the concept of a benevolent
(meaning nondiscriminatory and nonsubordinating) respect for culture.' 15 A LatCrit paradigm, while
embracing and being sensitive to cultural differences, must simultaneously reject oppressive aspects of
culture, particularly sex-subordinating or sex-marginalizing practices or beliefs. To attain such cultural
pluralism, the subject's position as part of a cultural whole must be considered. Thus, integral to the
LatCrit model is the asking of the "culture question"" 6 and the evaluation of the obtained
information from both the object and subject positions with the goal of articulating teorias that
promote equality, understanding, and full participation rather than imposing subjugating, cultureessentialist perspectives. A LatCrit project that fails to confront both the internal and external
components of Latina oppression will imagine an "equality" that will involve a job market open only to
Latinos; a concept of privacy that hides cosas de familia, including a few bruises and the occasional black
eye; a free market that exploits and undervalues Latinas' services (paying what the market will bear
means less when you are female or colored so imagine being female and colored); a culture that
requires them to be saints; a concept of citizenship that relegates Latinas to second-class membership in
all their communities; and a construction of racial, ethnic, and national identities that marginalizes them
as foreigners in all their worlds. Thus, it is imperative for Lat- Crit to emphasize the necessity and
demand for Latina participation in the social, political, communitarian, and legal discourse. Absent such
pathways for communication and absent such inclusion, Latinas, even those with passports, will remain
handicapped traveling their mundos.
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Alt Solves
We are a pre-requisite to questioning the naturalization of masculine values
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 31-32, MM]
This is quite a different concept of theory from positivism, and it is one that many IR feminists find
compatible with their orientations. Feminists claim that gender structures are socially constructed,
historically variable, and upheld through power relations that legitimize them. Like critical theorists,
most feminists would claim an emancipatory interest in seeking to overcome these structures of
domination. Most feminists would also agree with critical theorists that knowledge reflects certain
interests of the society from which it is produced; in IR, knowledge has generally been produced by
and for men, particularly elite men. Feminists are particularly concerned to examine and explain why
certain kinds of knowledge have been left out of the discipline. Like many critical theorists, they, too,
question the subject matter of conventional IR. Often focused on the lives of people at the margins of
global politics, they raise issues not normally considered part of the discipline and ask questions about
them in new ways. As Sandra Harding tells us, an important task of feminist theory is to make strange
what has previously appeared familiar, or to challenge us to question what has hitherto appeared as
“natural.” 92 A reexamination of the meaning of security in chapter 2 is an example of how feminists
are expanding the subject matter of IR. Many IR feminists would also agree with Robert Cox’s famous
definition of critical theory, which he contrasts with what he calls problem-solving theory, a type of
theory that takes the world as it finds it and implicitly accepts the prevailing order as its framework.
The purpose of problem solving is to make prevailing social and power relationships and the institutions
into which they are organized work smoothly, by dealing effectively with particular sources of trouble.93
Since feminist theorists believe that the world is characterized by socially constructed gender
hierarchies that are detrimental to women, and since they are committed to finding ways to eliminate
these hierarchies, they are unlikely to take such an epistemological stance. In contrast, Cox claims that
critical theory does not take institutions and social/power relations for granted but calls them into
question by concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of
changing. In other words, critical theory stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks
how that order came about; it can , therefore, be a guide to strategic action for bringing about an
alternative order. 94 Agreeing with Cox’s assertion that theory is always for someone and for some
purpose, the goal of feminist approaches is similar to that of critical theory as defined by Cox. Like
critical theorists, feminists are concerned with context and historical process and with “how we
construct, rather than dis-cover, our world(s).”95
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Knowledge-Production 1st
Methodology comes first—no research program comes from a neutral standpoint or
can be conducted sans the intrusion of power. Feminist methodologies are key to
draw attention to the way in which gendered and racialized hierarchies shape our
lives and ways of knowing.
Tickner 10 (Ann. scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University,
Washington DC, former Professor of International Relations at at the University of Southern California. .
"YOU MAY NEVER UNDERSTAND: PROSPECTS FOR FEMINIST FUTURES IN INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 19 and 20. HeinOnline. Web. 6 July 2013.
JMR)
For example, in a recent article in International Securiy, a mainstream journal in which most feminists,
who do not use social scientific methodologies, would have a hard time getting their work published,
Caprioli and her five co-authors, all of whom are associated with the WomenStats program, address the
issue of the marginalisation of contributions to feminist security studies; here they are referring to
research which does not use conventional methodologies. The authors attribute this marginality to
the use of what they call 'unconventional methodologies'; their solution seems to be that feminists
should adopt social scientific methodologies if they want to be accepted and taken seriously.4 8 As I
claimed twelve years ago in 'You just Don't Understand' and have restated on several occasions,49 the
gulf between positivist and post-positivist research traditions, feminist or otherwise, is far greater
than such comments would indicate. What this piece dismisses as 'unconventional methodologies'
encompass a wide array of rich historical, hermeneutic, humanistic and philosophical traditions of
knowledge- building that can also provide us with equally valid understandings of insecurity and
oppressions ° Whether these traditions can be bridged, as Ackerly suggests, or whether their differences
are too fundamental is a matter of much scholarly debate.5' I fear that such comments suggest that the
mainstream, even if it self-identifies as feminist, will never be able to understand or accept that there
are many valuable and legitimate ways of conducting 'scientific' research outside of positivist social
sciences practices. Observations on their quantitative work, such as those presented by the authors in
Politics and Gender, go some way in introducing a feminist sensibility into quantitative research that
recognises these epistemological issues; as such it should be welcomed. However, Parisi and Apodeka's
observation that knowledge is not neutral but situated in unequal structures of power is a deep
problem that is hard to solve. Feminists have made a unique contribution in drawing our attention to
these unequal power structures, gendered, racial or otherwise, that affect so many peoples' lives.
Importantly they have also alerted us to ways in which knowledge itself is complicit in legitimating
these hierarchical structures - the unequal terrain on which feminists attempt to engage with social
scientific research, and even the lack of engagement with other critical approaches noted by Georgina
Waylen, are examples of this. The fact that the mainstream in any discipline rarely reflects on such
issues, or feels itself obliged to respond to calls for such conversations, is itself an indication of the
power of hegemonic knowledge structures . However, perhaps it is time to put aside these unhelpful
debates and pursue the many fruitful ways that IR feminists, however they define themselves, are
investigating these oppressive structures, both material and ideational, and seeking ways to change
them. The location from which we do our research is for each of us to decide.
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Understanding methodology is a pre-requisite to policy action. Politics through a
gendered lens is necessary in order to solve the conflicts posed by the 1AC.
Peterson and Runyan 1999 (V. Spike Peterson, Professor of Political Science at University of
Arizona and Anne Sisson Runyan, Director, Center for Women’s Studies at University of Cincinnati,
Global Gender Issues, 1999 p. 1-3)
Whenever we study a topic, we do so through a lens that necessarily focuses our attention in
particular ways. By filtering or "ordering" what we look at, each lens enables us to see some things in
greater detail or more accurately or in better relation to certain other things. But this is unavoidably at
the expense of seeing other things that are rendered out of focus-filtered out--by each particular lens.
According to Paul Viotti and Mark Kauppi, various theoretical perspectives, or "images," of international
politics contain certain assumptions and lead us "to ask certain questions, seek certain types of answers,
and use certain methodological tools." 1 For example, different images act as lenses and shape our
assumptions about who the significant actors are (individuals? states? multinational corporations?),
what their attributes are (rationality? self-interest? power?), how social processes are categorized
(politics? cooperation? dependence?), and what outcomes are desirable (peace? national security?
global equity?). The images or lenses we use have important consequences because they structure
what we look for and are able to "see." In Patrick Morgan's words, "Our conception of [IR acts as a] map for directing our
attention and distributing our efforts, and using the wrong map can lead us into a swamp instead of taking us to higher ground." 2 What we
look for depends a great deal on how we make sense of, or "order," our experience. We learn our ordering systems in a variety of contexts.
From infancy on, we are taught to make distinctions enabling us to perform appropriately within a particular culture. As college students, we
are taught the distinctions appropriate to particular disciplines (psychology, anthropology, political science) and particular schools of thought
within them (realism, behavioralism, liberalism, structuralism).
No matter in which context we learned them, the
categories and ordering frameworks shape the lenses through which we look at, think about, and
make sense of the world around us. At the same time, the lenses we adopt shape our experience of
the world itself because they shape what we do and how and why we do it. For example, a political
science lens focuses our attention on particular categories and events (the meaning of power,
democracy, or elections) in ways that variously influence our behavior (questioning authority, protesting
abuse of power, or participating in electoral campaigns). By filtering our ways of thinking about and
ordering experience, the categories and images we rely on shape how we behave and thus the world
we live in: They have concrete consequences. We observe this readily in the case of self-fulfilling
prophecies: If we expect hostility, our own behavior (acting superior, displaying power) may elicit
responses (defensive posturing, aggression) that we then interpret as "confirming" our expectations. It
is in this sense that we refer to lenses and "realities" as interactive, interdependent, or mutually
constituted. Lenses shape who we are, what we think, and what actions we take, thus shaping the
world we live in. At the same time, the world we live in ("reality") shapes which lenses are available to
us, what we see through them, and the likelihood of our using them in particular contexts. In general, as
long as our lenses and images seem to "work," we keep them and build on them. Lenses simplify our
thinking. Like maps, they "frame" our choices and exploration, enabling us to take advantage of
knowledge already gained and to move more effectively toward our objectives. The more useful they
appear to be, the more we are inclined to take them for granted and to resist making major changes
in them. We forget that our particular ordering or meaning system is a choice among many alternatives.
Instead, we tend to believe we are seeing "reality" as it "is" rather than as our culture or discipline or
image interprets or "maps" reality. It is difficult and sometimes uncomfortable to reflect critically on our assumptions, to
question their accuracy or desirability, and to explore the implications of shifting our vantage point by adopting a different lens. Of course, the
world we live in and therefore our experiences are constantly changing; we have to continuously modify our images, mental maps, and
ordering systems as well. The required shift in lens may be minor: from liking one type of music to liking another, from being a high school
student in a small town to being a college student in an urban environment. Or the shift may be more pronounced: from casual dating to
parenting, from the freedom of student lifestyles to the assumption of full-time job responsibilities, from Newtonian to quantum physics, from
East-West rivalry to post-Cold War complexities. Societal shifts are dramatic, as we experience and respond to systemic transformations such as
economic restructuring, environmental degradation, or the effects of war.
To function effectively as students and scholars
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of world politics, we must modify our thinking in line with historical developments. That is, as "reality"
changes, our ways of understanding or ordering need to change as well. This is especially the case to
the extent that outdated worldviews or lenses place us in danger, distort our understanding, or lead us
away from our objectives. Indeed, as both early explorers and urban drivers know, outdated maps are
inadequate, and potentially disastrous, guides.
The method of knowing the world and organizing knowledge that the 1AC relies on
can and should be challenged on a level completely prior to questions of its practical
value
David Owen, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton, 2002, Millennium: Journal
of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, p. 658
To begin, consider Stephen White’s argument that engagement in practical philosophy involves two
basic human capacities: a capacity for world-disclosure and a capacity for action-coordination.10
World-disclosure refers to the ways in which we conceptualise the world or, more precisely, to the
world-pictures in terms of which we problematise our experience; the ways in which such-and-such is
constituted as an epistemic and ethical issue for us. More formally, world-disclosure refers to our
capacity to articulate a picture or perspective in terms of which our reflection on, and action in, the
world is guided, where the concept of a picture and the concept of a perspective are co-extensive in
that the former refers in a passive mode to what the latter refers in active mode. A picture refers to a
system of judgements in terms of which our being-in-the-world (or some feature of it) takes on its
intelligible character; a perspective refers to a system of judgements as a system of judging in terms of
which we make sense of ourselves (or some features of ourselves) as beings in the world.11 By contrast,
action-coordination refers to our capacity to provide reasons and motives for agents to act in suchand-such ways, that is, it refers to the ways in which epistemic and ethical theories or accounts are
mobilised to encourage particular forms of conduct on the part of agents.
Practical philosophy requires that both of these dimensions are brought into play. It is on the basis of
the former that such-and-such are constituted as issues for us; it is on the basis of the latter that we
seek to account for, and articulate responses to, these issues. In this respect, a particular instance of
practical philosophy may be challenged at two levels. On the one hand, it can be challenged at the
level of action-coordination in terms of its capacity to provide cogent reasons and compelling motives
for us to act in such-and-such a way; this can take the form of criticism of its epistemic and/or its ethical
character. On the other hand, it can be challenged at the level of world-disclosure in terms of its
capacity to make sense of the world in the ways that matter to us, that is to say that it can be
challenged at the level of the distinctions, concepts, assumptions, inferences and assertability warrants
that it invokes.
Investigation of the theory that underlies the affirmative comes before talking about
the plan – the failure to prioritize methodological questions means inevitable errorreplication and policy failure. This turns the case – if we win our indicts of their
method, it means the case only SEEMS like a good idea because it’s constructed by a
flawed method.
David Owen, Reader in Political Theory at the University of Southampton, 2002, Millennium: Journal
of International Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, p. 659-661
The first dimension concerns the relationship between positivist IR theory and postmodernist IR ‘theory’
(and the examples illustrate the claims concerning pluralism and factionalism made in the introduction
to this section). It is exhibited when we read Walt warning of the danger of postmodernism as a kind of
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theoretical decadence since ‘issues of peace and war are too important for the field [of IR] to be
diverted into a prolix and self-indulgent discourse that is divorced from the real world’,12 or find
Keohane asserting sniffily that
Neither neorealist nor neoliberal institutionalists are content with interpreting texts: both sets of
theorists believe that there is an international political reality that can be partly understood, even if it
will always remain to some extent veiled.13 We should be wary of such denunciations precisely
because the issue at stake for the practitioners of this ‘prolix and self-indulgent discourse’ is the
picturing of international politics and the implications of this picturing for the epistemic and ethical
framing of the discipline, namely, the constitution of what phenomena are appropriate objects of
theoretical or other forms of enquiry. The kind of accounts provided by practitioners of this type are
not competing theories (hence Keohane’s complaint) but conceptual reproblematisations of the
background that informs theory-construction, namely, the distinctions, concepts, assumptions,
inferences and assertability warrants that are taken for granted in the course of the debate between,
for example, neorealists and neoliberal institutionalists (hence the point-missing character of Keohane’s
complaint). Thus, for example, Michael Shapiro writes: The global system of sovereign states has been
familiar both structurally and symbolically in the daily acts of imagination through which space and
human identity are construed. The persistence of this international imaginary has helped to support the
political privilege of sovereignty affiliations and territorialities. In recent years, however, a variety of
disciplines have offered conceptualizations that challenge the familiar, bordered world of the discourse
of international relations.14 The point of these remarks is to call critically into question the background
picture (or, to use another term of art, the horizon) against which the disciplinary discourse and
practices of IR are conducted in order to make this background itself an object of reflection and
evaluation. In a similar vein, Rob Walker argues: Under the present circumstances the question ‘What is
to be done?’ invites a degree of arrogance that is all too visible in the behaviour of the dominant
political forces of our time. . . . The most pressing questions of the age call not only for concrete policy
options to be offered to existing elites and institutions, but also, and more crucially, for a serious
rethinking of the ways in which it is possible for human beings to live together.15 The aim of these
comments is to draw to our attention the easily forgotten fact that our existing ways of picturing
international politics emerge from, and in relation to, the very practices of international politics with
which they are engaged and it is entirely plausible (on standard Humean grounds) that, under changing
conditions of political activity, these ways of guiding reflection and action may lose their epistemic
and/or ethical value such that a deeper interrogation of the terms of international politics is required.
Whether or not one agrees with Walker that this is currently required, it is a perfectly reasonable issue
to raise. After all, as Quentin Skinner has recently reminded us, it is remarkably difficult to avoid falling
under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. . . . As we analyse and reflect on our normative
concepts, it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking about them
bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be the ways of thinking about
them.16 In this respect, one effect of the kind of challenge posed by postmodernists like Michael
Shapiro and Rob Walker is to prevent us from becoming too readily bewitched.
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Education First
Only by becoming conscious of the mestiza, by becoming conscious of ourselves, is it
possible traverse our borders of thinking
Anzaldúa 87 (Gloria. M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin and leading
scholar in Chicano cultural theory and Queer theory. Borderlands, la frontera: the new mestiza. Pgs 3637. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. eBook. JMR)
Every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a traversal, a crossing. I am again an alien in
new territory. And again, and again. But if I escape conscious awareness, escape "knowing." I won't
be moving. Knowledge makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. "Knowing" is painful
because after "it" happens I can't stay in the same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same
person I was before. No, it isn't enough that she is female-a second-class member of a conquered
people who are taught to believe they are inferior because they have indigenous blood, believe in the
supernatural and speak a deficient language. Now she beats herself over the head for her "inactivity," a
stage that IS as necessary as breathing. But that means being Mexican. All her life she's been told that
Mexicans are lazy. She has had to work twice as hard as others to meet the standards of the dominant
culture which have, in part, become her standards. Why does she have to go and try to make "sense"
of it all? Every time she makes "sense" of something, she has to "cross over," kicking a hole out of the
old boundaries of the self and slipping under or over, dragging the old skin along, stumbling over it. It
hampers her movement in the new territory, dragging the ghost of the past with her. It is a dry birth, a
breech birth, a screaming birth, one that fights her ·every inch of the way. It IS only when she is on the
other side and the shell cracks open and the lid from her eyes lifts that she sees things from a
different perspective. It is only then that she makes the connections, formulates the insights. It is only
then that her consciousness expands a tiny notch, another rattle appears on the rattlesnake tail and
the added growth slightly alters the sounds she makes. Suddenly the repressed energy rises, makes
decisions, connects with conscious energy and a new life begins. It is her reluctance to cross over, to
make a hole in the fence and walk across, to cross the river, to take that flying leap into the dark, that
drive her to escape, that forces her into the fecund cave of her imagination where she is cradled in the
arms of Coatlieue, who will never let her go. If she doesn't change her ways, she will remain a stone
forever. No hay mas que cambiar.
Education comes first—what we learn in debate becomes a part of who we are and
what we decide to do in the world
Tickner 10 (Ann. scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University,
Washington DC, former Professor of International Relations at at the University of Southern California. .
"YOU MAY NEVER UNDERSTAND: PROSPECTS FOR FEMINIST FUTURES IN INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 19 and 20. HeinOnline. Web. 6 July 2013.
JMR)
A few years ago, Anne Runyan, a feminist scholar who has moved from IR to Women's Studies, posed
the question as to whether feminists should seek to be at home in IR - that is to have their
perspectives legitimated within the discipline - or whether they should forget IR in order to build
more hospitable local/global homes for the world's inhabitants, especially those marginalised by world
politics as usual?52 Given my belief that knowledge and power cannot be separated, this is a question
that feminists must continue to ask, particularly in the United States where the hold of social scientific
methodologies is so strong and the implications of this, in terms of whose knowledge gets heard and
validated. While agreeing with many of the authors discussed in this article that mainstream IR may
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never 'understand', I still prefer to stay at home in IR. When my undergraduate IR students tell me that
my course, Gender and Global Issues, has changed the way they see the world, I feel some satisfaction
that I may have succeeded in a small way in the goal of making gender visible. Many IR and
International Law students go on to work in foreign policy establishments and international
institutions that are certainly in need of individuals who understand how global politics are deeply
gendered. The articles in this special issue are further evidence that making gender visible is a goal that
is succeeding in multiple locations and disciplines. Certainly we can all agree that feminist
internationalisms, from whatever location we choose to study them, have much to celebrate and
much work still to do.
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A/T: Framework – Languages
Their interpretation of a standardized model for debate re-entrenches oppression by
policing and silencing the native tongue – only a fluid interpretation can solve
Anzaldúa, Chicana cultural theorist and feminist, 1987
[Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 55-59, MM]
"Pocho, cultural traitor, you're speaking the oppressor's language by speaking English, you're ruining
the Spanish language," I have been accused by various Latinos and Latinas. Chicano Spanish is
considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of Spanish. But Chicano Spanish is
a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evolución, enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas
por invención o adopción have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje
que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language... For a
people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people
who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who
cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castillian) Spanish nor standard English, what
recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their
identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves-a language with
terms that are neither español ni ingles, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of
two languages. Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos’ need to identify ourselves as a distinct
people. We need a language with which we could communicate with ourselves, a secret language. For
some of us, language is a homeland closer than the Southwest-for many Chicanos today live in the
Midwest and the East. And because we are a complex, heterogeneous people, we speak many
languages. Some of the languages we speak are: 1. Standard English 2. Working class and slang English 3.
Standard Spanish 4. Standard Mexican Spanish 5. North Mexican Spanish dialect 6. Chicano Spanish
(Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have regional variations) 7. Tex-Mex 8. Pachuco (called calo)
My "home" tongues are the languages I speak with my sister and brothers, with my friends. They are the
last five listed" with 6 and 7 being closest to my heart. From school, the media and job situations, I've
picked up standard and working class English. From Mamagrande Locha and from reading Spanish and
Mexican literature, I've picked up Standard Spanish and Standard Mexican Spanish. From tos recien
llegados, Mexican immigrants, and braceros, I learned the North Mexican dialect. With Mexicans I’ll try
to speak either Standard Mexican Spanish or the North Mexican diaIect. From my parents and Chicanos
living in the Valley, I picked up Chicano Texas Spanish, and I speak it with my mom, younger brother
(who married a Mexican and who rarely mixes Spanish with English), aunts and older relatives. With
Chicanas from Nuevo Mexico or Arizona I will speak Chicano Spanish a little, but often they don't
understand what I'm saying. With most California Chicanas I speak entirely in English (unless] forget).
When I first moved to San Francisco, I'd rattle off something in Spanish, unintentionally embarrassing
them. Often it is only with another Chicana tejana that I can talk freely. Words distorted by English are
known as anglicisms or pochismos. The pocho is an anglicized Mexican or American of Mexican origin
who speaks Spanish with an accent characteristic of North Americans and who distorts and
reconstructs the language according to the influence of English, Tex-Mex, or Spanglish, comes most
naturally to me. I may switch back and forth from English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the
same word. With my sister and my brother Nune and with Chicano telano contemporaries I speak in
Tex-Mex. From kids and people my own age I picked up Pachuco. Pachuco (the language of the zoot
suiters) is a language of rebellion, both against Standard Spanish and Standard English. It is a secret
language. Adults of the culture and outsiders can’t understand it. It is made up of slang words from both
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English and Spanish. Ruca means girl or woman, vato means guy or dude, chate means no, simon means
yes, churro is sure, talk is periquiar, pigionear means petting, que gacho means how nerdy, ponte aguila
means watch out, death is called la pelona. Through lack of practice and not having others who can
speak it, I've lost most of the Pachuco tongue. Chicano Spanish Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/
Anglo colonization have developed significant differences in the Spanish we speak. We collapse two
adjacent vowels into a single syllable and sometimes shift the stress in certain words such as
maiz/maiz/cohete/uete. We leave out certain consonants when they appear between vowels: lado/lao,
mojado/mojao. Chicanos from South Texas pronounce fasj as injue (fue). Chicanos use "archaisms,"
words that are no longer in the Spanish language, words that have been evolved out. We say semos,
truje, haiga, ansina, and naiden. We retain the "archaic", as inlalar, that derives from an earherh, (the
French halaror the Germanic halo": which was lost to standard Spanish in the 16th century), but which is
found in several regional dialects such as the one spoken In South Texas. (Due to geography, Chicanos
from the Valley of South Texas were cut off linguistically from other Spanish speakers. We tend to use
words that the Spaniards brought over from Medieval Spain. The majority of the Spanish colonizers in
Mexico and the Southwest came from Extremadura-Hernan Cortes was one of them-and Andaluda.
Andalucians pronounce II like a), and their d's tend to be absorbed by adjacent vowels: tirado becomes
tirao. They brought el tenguaje popular, dialectos y regionalismos. 4 ) . Chicanos and other Spanish
speakers also shift it to y and z to S.5 We leave out initial syllables, saying tar for estar, to} for esto}, hora
for ahora (cubanos and puertorriquenos a1.so leave out initial letters of some words.) We also leave out
the fmal syllable such as pa for para. The intervocalic}, the II as in tortilta, ella,. bot ella, gets replaced by
tortia or tortiya, ea, botea. We add an additional syllable at the beginning of certain words: atocar. aor
tocar, agastar for gastar. Sometimes we'll say lavaste las vactijas, other times lavates (substituting the
ates verb endings for the asle). We use anglicisms, words borrowed from English: bola from ball,
carpeta from carpet, machina de lavar (instead of lavadora) from washing machine. Tex-Mex argot,
created by adding a Spanish sound at the beginning or end of an English word such as cookiar for cook,
watchar for watch, parktar for park, and rapiar for rape, is the result of the pressures on Spanish
speakers to adapt to English. We don't use the word vosatros/as its accompanying verb form. We don't
say claro (to mean yes), imaginate, or me emociona, unless we picked up Spanish from Latinas, or of a
book, or in a classroom. Other Spanish-speaking groups are going through the same, or similar,
development in their Spanish. Linguistic Terrorism Des/enguadaJ. Somos los del espanol deficiente. We
are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestisaje , the subject of your
burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally and
linguistically somos huerfanos-we speak an orphan tongue. Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano
Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language.
And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we
use our language differences against each other. Chicana feminists often skirt around each other with
suspicion and hesitation. For the longest time I couldn't figure it out. Then it dawned on me. To be dose
to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we'll see there. Pena. Shame.
Low estimation of self. In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our
native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives. Chicanas feel
uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure. Their language was not outlawed in
their countries. They had a whole lifetime of being immersed in their native tongue; generations,
centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in school, heard on radio and TV, and read in the
newspaper. If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a
low estimation of me. Often with mexicanas y latinas we'll speak English as a neutral language. Even
among Chicanas we tend to speak English at parties or conferences. Yet, at the same time, we're afraid
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the other will think we're agringadas because we don't speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other
trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be the "real" Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one
Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience. A monolingual Chicana whose first
language is English or Spanish is just as much a Chicana as one who speaks several variants of Spanish.
A Chicana from Michigan or Chicago or Detroit is jlu5t as much a Chicana as one from the Southwest.
Chicano Spanish is as diverse linguistically as it is regionally. By the end of this century, Spanish speakers
will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S., a country where students in high schools and
colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more "cultured." But for a
language to remain alive it must be used .. 6 By the end of this century English, and not Spanish, will be
the mother tongue of most Chicanos and Latinos. So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my
language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity- I am my language . Until I can take pride in
my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, TexMex and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to
write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak
English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the
English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no
longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my
serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition
of silence.
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A/T: Framework – Latina Identity Solves Policymaking
Ambiguity and contradictions are inevitable – only breaking from rigidity solves
violence and war
Anzaldúa, Chicana cultural theorist and feminist, 1987
[Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera, p. 79, MM]
These numerous possibilities leave La mestiza floundering in uncharted seas. In perceiving conflicting
information and points of view, she is subjected to a swamping of her psychological borders. She has
discovered that she can't hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries. The borders and walls that are
supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these
habits and patterns are the enemy within. Rigidity means death . Only by remaining flexible is she able
to stretch the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza constantly has to shift out of habitual
formations; from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning that tends to use rationality to move
toward a single goal (a Western mode), to divergent thinking, 4 characterized by movement away
from set patterns and goals and toward a more whole perspective, one that includes rather than
excludes. The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for
ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view.
She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode-nothing is
thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she
sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. She can be jarred out of
ambivalence by an intense, and often painful, emotional event which inverts or resolves the
ambivalence. I'm not sure exactly how. The work takes place underground - subconsciously. It is work
that the soul performs. That focal point or fulcrum, that juncture where the mestiza stands, is where
phenomena tend to collide. It is where the possibility of uniting all that is separate occurs. This
assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of
opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is
greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness - a mestiza
consciousness - and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative
motion that keeps breaking down the unitary as peer of each new paradigm. En unas pocas centurias,
the future will belong to the mestiza. Because the future depends on the breaking down of paradigms,
it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures. By creating a new mythos - that is, a change in
the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave - Ia mestiza creates
a new consciousness. The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality
that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is
transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the colored, between males and
females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our Eves, our culture, our
languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective
consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could , in our best hopes, bring us to
the end of rape, of violence, of war.
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A/T: Framework – Souls
Their framework arguments are an attempt to suppress our souls, our envisioning of
our Selves
Anzaldúa 87 (Gloria. M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin and leading
scholar in Chicano cultural theory and Queer theory. Borderlands, la frontera: the new mestiza. Pgs 3637. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. eBook. JMR)
Four years ago a red snake crossed my path as I walked through the woods. The direction of its
movement, its pace, its colors, the "mood" of the trees and the wind and the snake-they all "spoke" to
me, told me things. I look for omens everywhere; everywhere catch glimpses of the patterns and
cycles of my life. Stones "speak" to Luisah Teish, a Santera; trees whisper their secrets to Chrystos, a
Native American. I remember listening to the voices of the wind as a chime and understanding its
messages. Los espiritus that ride the back of the south wind. I remember their exhibition blowing in
through the slits in the door during those hot Texas afternoons. A gust of wind raising the linoleum
under my feet, buffeting the house, everything trembling. We're not supposed to remember such
otherworldly events. We're supposed to ignore, forget, kill those fleeting images of the soul's
presence and of the spirit's presence. We've been taught that tile spirit is outside our bodies or above
our heads some- where up in the sky with God. We're supposed to forget that every cell in our bodies,
every bone and bird and worm has spirit in it.
Only by breaking from our habitual groundings is it possible to shift our perceptions
and truly view the Self as Other and gain a consciousness of the mestiza Possible alt?
Anzaldúa 87 (Gloria. M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin and leading
scholar in Chicano cultural theory and Queer theory. Borderlands, la frontera: the new mestiza. Pgs 3637. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. eBook. JMR)
Fear develops the proximity sense aspect of la lacultad. But there is deeper sensing that is another
aspect of this faculty. It is anything that breaks into one's everyday mode of perception. That causes a
break in one's defenses and resistance, anything that takes one from one's habitual grounding, causes
the depths to open up, causes a shift in perception. This shift in perception deepens the way we see
concrete objects and people; the senses become so acute and piercing that we can see through things,
view events in depth, a piercing that reaches the underworld, (the realm of the soul). As we plunge
vertically, the break, with us accompanying new seeing, makes us pay attention to the soul, and we
are thus carried into awareness, an experiencing of soul (Self). We lose something in this mode of
initiation, something is taken from us: our innocence, our unknowing ways, our safe and easy
ignorance. There is a prejudice and a fear of the dark, Chthonic (underworld), material such as
depression, Illness death and the violations that can bring on this break. Confronting anything that
tears the fabric of our everyday mode of consciousness and that thrusts us into a less literal and more
psychic sense of reality increases awareness and la lacultad.
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Narratives
Narratives Key – specifically strong in the context of conventional IR
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 9, MM]
Since its inception, at the beginning of the century, the discipline of international relations has gone
through a series of debates over both its subject matter and the methodologies appropriate for its
investigations. 1 None of these debates have been as fundamental as those of the last two decades. The
end of the Cold War and the plurality of new issues on the global agenda, to which I referred in my
introductory chapter, have been accompanied by increasing calls for rethinking the foundations of a
discipline that appears to some to be out of touch with the revolutionary changes in world politics ,
as well as deficient in how to explain them. Justin Rosenberg has suggested that it is strange that
momentous events, such as the collapse of Soviet Communism, the strains of European integration, and
the economic growth of China (which presently contains one-fifth of the world’s population), events
that are part of a gigantic world revolution of modernization, industrialization, nationalism, and
globalization in which the West has been caught up for the last two hundred years, tend to be excluded
from most IR theory.2 Instead of what he claims are arid debates about hegemonic stability or order
versus justice, which abstract from real-world issues, Rosenberg calls for theory grounded in historical
and social analyses. He suggests that global issues can be better explained through narrative forms of
explanation rather than social-scientific methodologies of conventional IR.
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2NC Stuff
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A/T: Permutation – Ontology 1st
Our feminist analysis and their conception of IR are ontologically incompatible—the
nature of their thinking means that the sexed and gendered nature of the world is
necessarily erased.
Youngs 4 (Gillian Youngs is a Lecturer at the Center for Mass Communication Research at the
University of Leicester, “Feminist International Relations: A Contradiction in Terms? Or: Why Women
and Gender Are Essential to Understanding the World 'We' Live in”, International Affairs (Royal Institute
of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 80, No. 1, January, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3569295)
The deliberately blunt and provocative nature of the title of this article is intended to get us right to the
heart of the matter: the gulf that continues to exist between what might be called mainstream
('malestream' is a term frequently used in feminist critiques) International Relations and feminist
International Relations. Feminist International Relations has tended to flourish as a subfield of the main
field of International Relations, without much impact on the field as a whole. While it is positive and
productive that feminist analysis in the subject thrives-a fact to which the development and growth of a
journal like IFjP bears witness'-it is also problematic that the impact of this activity in the field as a whole
remains at best limited and at worst non-existent. It seems clear from feminist work to date that these
knowledge gaps have many dimensions, and perspectives on them differ starkly depending on which
side of the feminist versus mainstream International Relations divide the researcher stands.2 The
divide itself is complex, weaving together threads of history, of academic, political and gender
identity, of power and resistance. This complexity is bound up with changing world views and their
implications, and thus with the dynamic relationship of the field of International Relations to its diverse
subject-matter. As the title of this article indicates, we need to consider women and gender in order to
examine the fundamental contributions that feminist International Relations makes to the realms of
theory and practice. In broad terms, feminist International Relations has expanded, and built on, the
work of feminist political and economic theory to examine the masculinist framing of politics and
economics and associated institutions, including notably the state and its key military and
governmental components, as well as the discourses through which these institutions operate and are
reproduced over time. In the course of this work, feminist analysis has highlighted three major related
phenomena: * The state and market, in theory and practice, are gendered by masculinist assumptions
and structures. * The dominant conceptualization of political and economic agency in male dominated
terms ignores both women's realities and their active contributions to political and economic life. *
Lack of attention to the analytical category of gender obscures the interrelated social construction of
male and female identities and roles. Feminist International Relations has identified malestream
International Relations theory as one of the discourses that help perpetuate a distorted and partial
world view that reflects the disproportionate power of control and influence that men hold, rather
than the full social reality of the lives of women, children and men. Thus this theory is more reflective
and expressive of historically established male power than it is an open and comprehensive
exploration of the political and economic processes in which all members of societies are engaged. It is
more a discourse of and about the powerful than one that seeks to examine deeply how power works,
including its gendered, racialized and socioeconomic dimensions, or to situate individuals and groups
differently in terms of contrasting levels of capacity, control, influence and freedom. Central tasks for
feminist International Relations and International Political Economy have therefore been both
deconstructive and reconstructive: focusing on revealing through critique the masculinist limitations of
mainstream approaches, but also, crucially, going beyond those limitations and investigating political
and economic processes in which women and men are engaged. Women and gender are both
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important, for separate but related reasons. Where women have been largely absent from mainstream
International Relations, it has been essential to develop increasing bodies of theoretical and substantive
research related to them. This has been a major focus of feminist International Relations, as is illustrated
further below. The concept of gender keeps to the fore the relational nature of categorizations of male
and female, and signals the importance of not taking either as given or necessarily natural. Both women
and gender have therefore been identified by feminist analyses as problematically absent from
mainstream approaches and essential to understanding international relations. In exploring why the
gulf on these points continues to exist between malestream and feminist International Relations, it is
helpful to think through some of the obstacles to bridging it. I do this in the next section of this article
by considering the problem of the ontological revisionism required of malestream analysis if it is to
share the same ground as feminist perspectives that count women and gender as fundamental to
understanding international relations. In arguing that women and gender are essential to the field of
International Relations, feminist scholars have had to address the core concepts and issues of the field:
war, militarism and security; sovereignty and the state; and globalization. In the remainder of the
article, I discuss how feminist work has followed this trajectory, illustrating how an emphasis on gender
has generated an increasing focus on masculinity and its multidimensionality and complexity; on the
diversity of women's lives, identities and strategies; and on the power differentiations among women,
as well as between them and men, and among men.
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A/T: Permutation – Methods
Our link is not to their research methods in the abstract—rather, it is to the way in
which their methods categorically and politically exclude women and minorities from
analysis.
Tickner 10 (Ann. scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University,
Washington DC, former Professor of International Relations at at the University of Southern California. .
"YOU MAY NEVER UNDERSTAND: PROSPECTS FOR FEMINIST FUTURES IN INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 19 and 20. HeinOnline. Web. 6 July 2013.
JMR)
Writing ten years after 'You Just Don't Understand', Laura Sjoberg claims that there is a sense among
feminists that the mainstream will never understand and, therefore, it may no longer be a worthwhile
project to try to 'mainstream' feminist IR (I should add that many, including Zalewski, have never felt it
to be a worthwhile project). Like many of us, Sjoberg claims that feminist IR and mainstream IR are
different worlds - besides its commitment to gender-based analysis as crucial to its disciplinary inquiry,
feminism, for Sjoberg, 'is a world of contingency, subjectivity, emancipation and empathy'.25 She cites
Sarah Brown's claim in 1988, before the field was established, that only with feminist IR can the
mainstream have a complete understanding of global politics. Nevertheless, like Zalewski, Brown
worried that feminist IR might lose something were it to try to fit into the discipline. 26 With these
concerns in mind, Sjoberg asks where we would go if we left IR, a point to which I will return in my
conclusion. Painting a more optimistic picture of feminist IR's acceptance in Australia, Katrina Lee- Koo
also suggests that feminist IR scholarship's goal to make gender visible 'is not well served by rehashing
decades-long debates in the top-tier journals about the relevance of gender to IR'.27 While I am inclined
to agree with this argument at this point, these reflective discussions (if only among ourselves) do raise
some important issues that are still worth considering. The first is the issue of marginality and where
we do, and should, locate ourselves in the discipline. If our conversations are not being heard by nonfeminists, mainstream or critical, should we abandon them? Second, what about the social scientific
quantitative work dismissed by most of the IR feminists who have participated in these
conversations?28 With the increasing prominence of this type of work in mainstream journals, this
promises to be an issue that will stay with us. While I realise that this issue has more resonance for
those of us located in the United States, it does speak to the wider concern for all feminists - whose
knowledge is recognised and validated as legitimate?29 Finally, should we continue to stay connected to
IR, even at the margins? The Gender and Politics edited collection includes contributions from three
scholars who self-identify as IR feminists and who use quantitative positivist research methods. Laura
Parisi asks how we might reconcile feminist theorising with quantitative methods. Situated in an
interdisciplinary Women's Studies department and influenced by work in feminist economics and
development studies, Parisi reflects on her own journey which has taken her beyond asking whether we
should engage in positive research methods to an attempt to understand their limitations as well as
their promise. She claims that we should not reject all positivist models because they are positivist, but
rather, those which do not draw on theoretical insights from feminist scholars about gender
relations.38 For Parisi, the question becomes how 'we might effectively utilise quantitative
methodologies in our goal of transforming hierarchical gender, racial, ethnic, class, and sexual
relations that feminise and marginalise many, including men '.39 The biggest challenge is to overcome
the tension between sex disaggregated data that places too much emphasis on the material
dimensions of power to the exclusion of social and ideological power relations. She concludes that we
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can use feminist theorising to explain why this is so and to frame our interpretation of statistical
findings.40 Parisi also concludes that quantitative tools can provide an entry point for deeper qualitative
analysis. Clair Apodeca, another author in this volume, identifies herself as a positivist, quantitatively
trained, feminist researcher whose normative goal is to empower women and create social change.41
She affirms that feminists such as her do believe that feminist research questions can be answered
using social scientific explanatory frameworks. She claims that, if one is working for incremental
change within the existing system, there are benefits in using the dominant language of the
patriarchal system and that using data and statistical analysis is no less feminist than other forms of
research. The major obstacle she sees for this type of research is the politically motivated and biased
acts of data collection by states and international institutions that decide which segments of the
population are considered worthy of being counted and which are ignored - with women usually in
the latter category. Apodeca concedes that most quantitative feminists would agree that knowledge is
not neutral but situated in structures of social, economic and political power. While the researcher's
interpretations must take this into account, Apodeca concludes that we need more, not less, data. She
quotes the CEDAW's plea 'that statistical information is absolutely necessary in order to understand the
real situation of women in each of the states that are parties to the Convention'.42
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A/T: Permutation – Cooption
Securitization coopts the alternative
True 10 (Jacqui. Associate Dean Research, Professor of Politics & IR at Monash University. "THE
POLITICAL ECONOMY OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: A FEMINIST INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
PERSPECTIVE." Australian Feminist Law Journal 32 (2010): pg 58-59. Print. JMR)
In the international security approach the political-economic dimensions of sexual violence against
women are obscured. We do not ask why or for what purpose women are raped,1' and how the
purpose may be related to the roots of the conflict. Moreover, most security approaches do not
consider how sexual, often gender-based, violence might be prevented in the long term, although
Resolution 1889 encourages member states to address the socio-economic needs of women. Most
often the linkage between political economy and violence against women is made in terms of the
(under-researched) impact of sexual violence on the post-conflict reconstruction since it may affect
food production and supply given women's role as agricultural producers. Or the linkage is made with
reference to the importance of securing women's economic and social rights in peacebuilding.'2 But
the causes of conflict, and of gender-based violence and women's insecurity, are not discussed or
connected to structural inequalities in local household and global political economies that persist and
may be exacerbated after conflict. In UN discourse, then, women survivors of sexual violence (but not
of domestic violence or the violence of poverty) are treated as the passive victims of (bad) men's
violence requiring special protection from the international community (read; good men).
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A/T: Permutation – State
The permutation fails – beginning with the state as the basic ontological unit of
international relations necessarily excludes the analysis of women’s issues: domestic
labor, civilian casualties, and gendered violence.
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 3-6, MM]
It is this lack of connection that motivates many of the issues raised in this book. While I have attempted
to site feminist perspectives within the discipline, it will become clear from the topics addressed that IR
feminists frequently make different assumptions about the world, ask different questions, and use
different methodologies to answer them. Having reflected on reasons for these disconnections, as
well as the misunderstandings over the potential usefulness of feminist approaches raised by some of
the questions above, I believe that they lie in the fact that feminist IR scholars see different realities and
draw on different epistemologies from conventional IR theorists. For example, whereas IR has
traditionally analyzed security issues either from a structural perspective or at the level of the state
and its decision makers, feminists focus on how world politics can contribute to the insecurity of
individuals, particularly marginalized and disempowered populations. They examine whether the
valorization of characteristics associated with a dominant form of masculinity influences the foreign
policies of states. They also examine whether the privileging of these same attributes by the realist
school in IR may contribute to the reproduction of conflict-prone, power-maximizing behaviors.11
Whereas IR theorists focus on the causes and termination of wars, feminists are as concerned with
what happens during wars as well as with their causes and endings. Rather than seeing military
capability as an assurance against outside threats to the state, militaries are seen as frequently
antithetical to individual security, particularly to the security of women and other vulnerable groups.
Moreover, feminists are concerned that continual stress on the need for defense helps to legitimate a
kind of militarized social order that overvalorizes the use of state violence for domestic and
international purposes. Conventional IPE has typically focused on issues such as the economic behavior
of the most powerful states, hegemony, and the potential for building international institutions in an
anarchic system populated by self-interested actors; within a shared state-centric framework,
neorealists and neoliberals debate the possibilities and limitations of cooperation using the notion of
absolute versus relative gains.12 Feminists more often focus on economic inequality, marginalized
populations, the growing feminization of poverty and economic justice, particularly in the context of
North/South relations. Whereas IR has generally taken a “top-down” approach focused on the great
powers, feminist IR often begins its analysis at the local level, with individuals embedded in social
structures. While IR has been concerned with explaining the behavior and interaction of states and
markets in an anarchic international environment, feminist IR, with its intellectual roots in feminist
theory more generally, is seeking to understand the various ways in which unequal gender structures
constrain women’s, as well as some men’s, life chances and to prescribe ways in which these
hierarchical social relations might be eliminated. These different realities and normative agendas
lead to different methodological approaches. While IR has relied heavily on rationalistic theories
based on the natural sciences and economics, feminist IR is grounded in humanistic accounts of social
relations, particularly gender relations. Noting that much of our knowledge about the world has been
based on knowledge about men, feminists have been skeptical of methodologies that claim the
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neutrality of their facts and the universality of their conclusions. This skepticism about empiricist
methodologies extends to the possibility of developing causal laws to explain the behavior of states.
While feminists do see structural regularities, such as gender and patriarchy, they define them as
socially constructed and variable across time, place, and culture; understanding is preferred over
explanation.13 These differences over epistemologies may well be harder to reconcile than the
differences in perceived realities discussed above. Subsequent chapters of this book serve two
purposes. First, they elaborate upon and forge a better understanding of the ontological and
epistemological differences between feminists and IR scholars. These differences will become evident as
subsequent chapters move further away from traditional IR concerns. Although security (the subject of
chapter 2) is central to both conventional IR and feminist perspectives, even though each approaches it
from quite different perspectives, democratization (one of the topics in chapter 4) has not been central
to IR as conventionally defined. The second goal is to demonstrate what feminist approaches to IR are
contributing and can contribute to our understanding of global politics. While not suggesting that they
can tell us everything we need to know about world politics, feminists are challenging us to see the
inequality and domination aspects of “common sense” gender differences. For example, uncovering
previously hidden gender hierarchies in policy priorities or workplace participation can show how they
contribute to conflict and injustice in ways that have detrimental effects on the security of both men
and women. Much of feminist analysis draws upon and intersects with that of scholars who would not
consider themselves part of the discipline of IR; this suggests that feminists are charting their own
voyages of discovery rather than staying within the confines of the discipline. Debates as to how
connected feminism should be to the discipline are central to feminist discussions . Acknowledging
these concerns, chapter 1 attempts to situate feminist scholarship within an increasingly fragmented
discipline of IR. Subsequent chapters do the same in a variety of issue areas. A sharp division between
realism and liberalism, and their neorealist and neoliberal versions, and critical and postpositivist
approaches is now evident in IR.14 While there is no necessary connection between postpositivism and
feminism, many IR feminists would identify themselves as postpositivists. Additionally, many would be
uncomfortable describing themselves as either liberals or realists. For these reasons, they are closer to
other critical approaches than to conventional theory; they are distinctive, however, in that their work is
also grounded in contemporary feminist theoretical debates and by the fact that all of them use gender
as a central category of analysis. Chapter 2 deals with war, peace, and security—issues that continue to
be central to the discipline. While realists see the contemporary system as only a temporary lull in
great-power conflict, others see a change in the character of war, with the predominance of conflicts
of state building and state disintegration driven by ethnic and national identities as well as by material
interests. Since feminists use gender as a category of analysis, issues of identity are central to their
approach; chapter 2 explores the ways in which the gendering of nationalist and ethnic identities can
exacerbate conflict . Feminists are also drawing our attention to the increasing impact of these types of
military conflicts on civilian populations. Civilians now account for about 90 percent of war casualties,
the majority of whom are women and children. Questioning traditional IR boundaries between
anarchy and danger on the outside and order and security on the inside, as well as the realist focus on
states and their interactions, feminists have pointed to insecurities at all levels of analysis; for
example, Katharine Moon has demonstrated how the “unofficial” support of military prostitution
served U.S. alliance goals in Korea, thus demonstrating links between interpersonal relations and
state policies at the highest level.15 Feminist analysis of wartime rape has shown how militaries can be
a threat even to their own populations;16 again, feminist scholarship cuts across the conventional
focus on interstate politics or the domestic determinants of foreign policy. Feminists have claimed that
the likelihood of conflict will not diminish until unequal gender hierarchies are reduced or eliminated;
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the privileging of characteristics associated with a stereotypical masculinity in states’ foreign policies
contributes to the legitimization not only of war but of militarization more generally. Wary of what
they see as gendered dichotomies that have pitted realists against idealists and led to overly simplistic
assumptions about warlike men and peaceful women,17 certain feminists are cautioning against the
association of women with peace, a position that, they believe, disempowers both women and peace.
The growing numbers of women in the military also challenges and complicates these essentialist
stereotypes. To this end, and as part of their effort to rethink concepts central to the field, feminists
define peace and security, not in idealized ways often associated with women, but in broad,
multidimensional terms that include the elimination of social hierarchies such as gender that lead to
political and economic injustice.
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A/T: Permutation – Link Booster
Realist international relations place hegemonic, masculine discourse and perpetuate
domination and violence.
Blanchard 03 (Eric, PhD in Political Science from University of Southern California and American
Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellow, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development
of Feminist Security Theory”, http://people.reed.edu/~ahm/Courses/Reed-POL-240-2012S1_IP/Syllabus/EReadings/05.1/05.1.zFurther_Blanchard2003Gender.pdf, pg. 1297)
Tickner’s book in particular presents an early feminist critique of the realist tradition and the first step to
evaluating prevalent notions of security from a gender-sensitive perspective. With its military focus, IR
security studies had become, according to Tickner, a “dysfunctional” response to the challenges of
human and environmental security. As Tickner explains, realism stresses rationality, strength, power,
autonomy, and independence, qualities as associated with foreign policy and military affairs as they
are with masculinity (1992, 3). She problematizes as well the exogeniety of domestic affairs in the
realist account and shows how ostensibly objective realist national security studies attempt to explain
the causes of war through a discourse that privileges a view based on hegemonic masculinity. While
realists take power as the coercive means by which states obtain security at the expense of other states,
Tickner suggests instead that an ethos of “mutual enablement rather than domination” could underlie
a positive-sum notion of security inspired by peace activism (1992, 65). Like Elshtain, Tickner
challenges the realist aversion to morality in IR, questioning the adaptation of a set of public (and thus
international) values as a basis for security so wildly at odds with the values we “espouse at home”
(1992, 138). Applying gender as a category of analysis to show the possibility of a more comprehensive
notion of security, Tickner traces the linkage between the system of international relations (and its
theorization) and multileveled, gendered insecurities. Against realism’s assumption of autonomous
states and its prescription of self-help in a hostile anarchical environment, Tickner argues that the
threats of the nuclear age, cross-border environmental degradation, and evidence of increasing
international cooperation demand that interdependence be taken seriously (1992). For Tickner, the
assumption that there is order within and anarchy beyond the bounds of the community effects a
divide between international and domestic politics that mirrors the public-private split that feminist
theorists argue perpetuates domestic violence. Tickner rejects the analytic separation of explanations
for war into distinct levels and the identification of security with state borders, arguing that violence at
the international, national, and family levels is interrelated, ironically taking place in domestic and
international spaces beyond the reaches of law (1992, 58, 193). Feminists in IR find the levels-of-analysis
approach particularly inappropriate to their concerns because the problem of the system of patriarchy
cannot be addressed solely by reference to particular actors, whether they are men or states (Brown
1988, 473).
Realist international relations are patriarchal and depend on masculine principles to
conduct international politics.
Blanchard 03 (Eric, PhD in Political Science from University of Southern California and American
Council of Learned Societies Faculty Fellow, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development
of Feminist Security Theory”, http://people.reed.edu/~ahm/Courses/Reed-POL-240-2012S1_IP/Syllabus/EReadings/05.1/05.1.zFurther_Blanchard2003Gender.pdf, pg. 1293)
Feminists in IR argue that realism, dominated by elite, white, male practitioners, is a patriarchal
discourse that renders women invisible from the high politics of IR even as it depends on women’s
subjugation as a “‘domesticated’ figure whose ‘feminine’ sensibilities are both at odds with and
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inconsequential to the harsh ‘realities’ of the public world of men and states” (Runyan and Peterson
1991, 68–69). Feminists in IR explain the exclusion of women from foreign policy decision making by
pointing to the “extent to which international politics is such a thoroughly masculinized sphere of
activity that women’s voices are considered inauthentic” (Tickner 1992, 4). Women’s traditional
exclusion from the military and continuing lack of access to political power at times presents women
with a “catch-22” situation. For example, the importance of a candidate’s military service as a
qualification for government office in U.S. political campaigns puts women, who cannot appeal to this
experience, at a disadvantage in obtaining the elite status of national office and thus the ability to affect
defense and security policies (Tobias 1990; cf. Elshtain 2000, 445). However, the FST critique is not
limited to strategies for getting more women access to corridors of power; feminists also direct our
attention to the gendered structure of IR theory. As the title of a classic IR text indicates, the study of
international politics has been concerned first and foremost with Man, the State, and War (Waltz
1959). In this book, neorealist Kenneth Waltz turns to the canons of political philosophy for an
explanation of the causes of war by asking whether wars are caused by human nature, by the internal
structure of states, or by the international system. An important component of the study of IR is a selfpositioning in the tradition of Western political theory—tracing an intellectual lineage to Machiavelli and
Hobbes—particularly as it concerns the state. Feminist analysis of this pedigree shows that the feminine
has long served as a symbolic threat to militarized Western conceptualizations of political community,
from the ancient Greeks to the twentieth century; Aeschylus’s Furies and Machiavelli’s Fortuna are but
two examples (Harstock 1983). Rebecca Grant (1991) argues that a gender bias in IR, transmitted
unproblematically from Western political thought to the study of IR, results in the question of gender
being taken as irrelevant. For Grant, IR’s interpretation of Hobbes allows “no room for the question of
how gender relations affect the transition out of the brutish state of nature and into society,” while
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous stag hunt, often invoked as a parable of the problems of security,
ignores the familial relations that control the hunter’s defection from the hunting circle (10–15). Taking
men as the sole political actors and citizens, the political theory borrowed by IR postulates a
domestic/international divide premised on the private/public distinction that relegates women to a
space outside politics (9).
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A/T: Class
Feminist analysis is a prerequisite to a capitalist critique
Mohanty 2003 [Chandra Talpade. professor of Women's and Gender Studies, "'Under Western Eyes'
Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles." Signs: Journal Of Women In Culture &
Society 28.2 (2003): 499.]
While women are present as leaders and participants in most of these antiglobalization movements, a
feminist agenda only emerges in the post- Beijing “women’s rights as human rights” movement and in
some peace and environmental justice movements. In other words, while girls and women are central
to the labor of global capital, antiglobalization work does not seem to draw on feminist analysis or
strategies. Thus, while I have argued that feminists need to be anticapitalists, I would now argue that
antiglobalization activists and theorists also need to be feminists. Gender is ignored as a category of
analysis and a basis for organizing in most of the antiglobalization movements, and antiglobalization
(and anticapitalist cri- tique) does not appear to be central to feminist organizing projects, es- pecially in
the First World/North. In terms of women’s movements, the earlier “sisterhood is global” form of
internationalization of the women’s movement has now shifted into the “human rights” arena. This shift
in language from “feminism” to “women’s rights” can be called the main- streaming of the feminist
movement—a (successful) attempt to raise the issue of violence against women onto the world stage. If
we look carefully at the focus of the antiglobalization movements, it is the bodies and labor of women
and girls that constitute the heart of these struggles. For instance, in the environmental and ecological
movements such as Chipko in India and indigenous movements against uranium mining and breast-milk
contamination in the United States, women are not only among the leadership: their gendered and
racialized bodies are the key to demystifying and combating the processes of recolonization put in place
by corporate control of the environment. My earlier discussion of Vandana Shiva’s analysis of the WTO
and biopiracy from the epistemological place of Indian tribal and peasant women illustrates this claim,
as does Grace Lee Boggs’s notion of “place-based civic activism” (2000, 19). Similarly, in the
anticorporate consumer movements and in the small farmer movements against agribusiness and the
antisweatshop movements, it is women’s labor and their bodies that are most affected as workers,
farmers, and consumers/household nurturers. Women have been in leadership roles in some of the
cross-border alliances against corporate injustice. Thus, making gender, and women’s bodies and labor,
visible and theorizing this visibility as a process of articulating a more inclusive politics are crucial
aspects of feminist anticapitalist critique. Be- ginning from the social location of poor women of color
of the Two-Thirds World is an important, even crucial, place for feminist analysis; it is precisely the
potential epistemic privilege of these communities of women that opens up the space for
demystifying capitalism and for envisioning transborder social and economic justice.
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AFF
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Perm – Methodologies
Feminist critiques mistakenly assume that there is no place for women in IR, but the
analysis of women’s issues can be taken up by mainstream IR methodologies. This is
better than the K because social scientific methodologies can best quantify and solve
the harms of patriarchy.
Caprioli, Dept. of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, 4
[Mary, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International Studies
Review, Volume: 42, p. 255-259, MM]
Conventional feminist IR scholars misrepresent the field of international relations in arguing that IR
scholarship as popularly accepted excludes alternative explanations of state behavior, including feminist
inquiry, that go beyond structural, state-focused models. Feminist IR theorists, among others, critique
the IR field for its state-centric approach and argue that ‘‘a world of states situated in an anarchical
international system leaves little room for analyses of social relations, including gender relations’’
(Tickner 2001:146). As a result, they appear to set up a straw man by refusing to recognize the variety
within ‘‘conventional’’ IR research. Indeed, as Jack Levy (2000) has observed, a significant shift to
societal-level variables has occurred, partly in response to the decline in the systemic imperatives of the
bipolar era. Certainly the democratic peace literature, particularly its normative explanation (Maoz and
Russett 1993; Dixon 1994), among other lines of inquiry, recognizes the role of social relations in
explaining state behavior. The normative explanation for the democratic peace thesis emphasizes the
societal level values of human rights, support for the rule of law, and peaceful conflict resolution in
explaining the likelihood of interstate conflict. Furthermore, dyadic tests of the democratic peace
thesis rely ‘‘on an emerging theoretical framework that may prove capable of incorporating the
strengths of the currently predominant realist or neorealist research program, and moving beyond it’’
(Ray 2000:311). In addition, theorizing and research in the field of ethnonationalism has highlighted
connections that domestic ethnic discrimination and violence have with state behavior at the
international level (Gurr and Harff 1994; Van Evera 1997; Caprioli and Trumbore 2003a, 2003b).
Contrary to the argument that conventional IR theory excludes feminist inquiry, space exists within
the field of international relations for feminist inquiry even allowing for a state-centric focus, just as
room exists for scholars interested in exploring the democratic peace and ethnonationalism.
International relations feminists make the same mistake that they accuse IR scholars of making:
narrowing the space for various worldviews, thereby creating competition and a sense of exclusion
among the so-called others. If the role of ‘‘feminist theory is to explain women’s subordination, or the
unjustified asymmetry between women’s and men’s social and economic positions, and to seek
prescriptions for ending it’’ (Tickner 2001:11), then feminist IR scholarship ought to allow for an
explanation of how women’s subordination or inequality has an impact on state behavior, assuming a
state-centric focus, while at the same time challenging the predetermination of a structural analysis.
If domestic inequality does affect state behavior, or even perpetuates the existence of states, then
policy prescriptions should be sought. Feminists most consistently argue that improving the condition
of women, challenging gender-neutral assumptions that are really male-centric, highlighting the
pernicious effects of gender hierarchy, and committing to social justice are critical and necessary
components of feminist international relations (see Peterson 2002). At the most basic level, feminist
international relations challenges the assumption that theories are gender neutral (Pettman 2002);
Christine Sylvester (2002a) has argued that feminists generally begin with gender but that not all such
scholars are feminists first. Indeed, ‘‘some prefer starting with a recognizable IR topic and bringing to it
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new gender-highlighting questions’’ (Sylvester 2002b:181). The role of feminist IR scholarship has also
been identified as showing ‘‘how gender relations of inequality act to exclude women from the business
of foreign policymaking’’ (Tickner 1999:48). At issue is the question: might feminist IR scholarship
benefit from moving beyond a focus on the exclusion of women toward a focus on the impact of that
exclusion on state behavior? Feminist and gendered scholarship, regardless of methodology, can
further feminist goals by focusing on the role that the norms of inequality and dominance play in
constructing the international political world, including that of state behavior, rather than only on the
bias inherent in male-centered inquiry and the unequal impact of state violence on women. Creating
False Dichotomies: Conventional feminists appear to make several errors in creating a dichotomy
between what is considered ‘‘feminist’’ research and what would be called quantitative research.
First, by maintaining that a dichotomy exists between methodologies, conventional IR feminists
create and perpetuate a hierarchy. Second, conventional IR feminists commit the same error they
accuse IR scholars of making by limiting the definition of legitimate scholarship based on
methodology. Third, conventional feminists routinely accept the socially constructed belief in the
superiority of quantitative methodology rather than deconstructing this notion and accepting
quantitative methodology as one of many imperfect research tools. There is little utility in constructing
a divide if none exists. As Thomas Kuhn (1962) argues, common measures do exist across paradigms
that provide a shared basis for theory. It seems overly pessimistic to accept Karl Popper’s ‘‘Myth of
Framework,’’ which postulates that ‘‘we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories, our
expectations, our past experiences, our language, and that as a consequence, we cannot communicate
with or judge those working in terms of a different paradigm’’ (Neufeld 1995:44). Some feminists (for
example, Tickner 1996, 2001; Peterson 2002; Steans 2003) appear to embrace this ‘‘Myth of
Framework’’ by accentuating the differences between the perspectives of feminist and IR theorists
based on their past experiences and languages and criticize IR theorists for their lack of
communication with feminist IR scholars. Ironically, the ‘‘Myth of Framework’’ shares a number of
assumptions with Hobbes’s description of the state of nature that feminists routinely reject. The ‘‘Myth
of Framework’’ assumes no middle ground - scholars are presumably entrenched in their own
worldviews without hope of compromise or the ability to understand others’ worldviews. If this is the
case, scholars are doomed to discussions with likeminded individuals rather than having a productive
dialogue with those outside their own worldview. Scholars who accept the ‘‘Myth of Framework’’
have essentially created a Tower of Babel in which they choose not to understand each other’s
language. The acceptance of such a myth creates conflict and establishes a hierarchy within
international relations scholarship even though conventional feminists theoretically seek to identify
and eradicate conflict and hierarchy within society as a whole. The purported language difference
between feminist and IR scholars appears to be methodological. In general, feminist IR scholars2 are
skeptical of empiricist methodologies and ‘‘have never been satisfied with the boundary constraints of
conventional IR’’ (Tickner 2001:2). As noted above, conventional international relations is defined on the
basis of methodology as a commitment ‘‘to empiricism and data-based methods of testing’’ (Tickner
2001:149). Ironically, some feminist IR scholars place boundary constraints on feminist IR scholarship
by limiting its definition to a critical-interpretive methodology (see Carpenter 2003:ftn. 1). Rather than
pushing methodological boundaries to expand the field and to promote inclusiveness, conventional IR
feminists appear to discriminate against quantitative research. If conventional feminists are willing to
embrace multicultural approaches to feminism, why restrict research tools? There would seem to be
a lack of consistency between rhetoric and practice. Especially at the global level, there need not be
only one way to achieve feminist goals. Hence, conventional feminist IR scholars might benefit from
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participating in mainstream IR scholars’ evolving embrace of methodological pluralism and
epistemological opportunism (Bueno de Mesquita 2002; Chan 2002; Fearon and Wendt 2002). One must
assume that feminist IR scholars support the pursuit of research that broadens our understanding of
international relations. Such a research agenda must include both evidence and logic (Bueno de
Mesquita 2002; Chan 2002). Theorizing, case study evidence (specific details), and external validity
(generality) are all necessary components of researchFonly through a combination of all three modes of
inquiry can we begin to gain confidence in our understanding. ‘‘And still we debate what seems to have
been obvious to our predecessors: to gain understanding, we need to integrate careful empirical
analysis with the equally careful application of the power of reason’’ (Bueno de Mesquita 2002:2).
Different types of scholarship ‘‘make different contributions that can be mutually beneficial, as when
historical studies isolate immediate causes that act as catalysts for the general tendencies identified in
aggregate analyses’’ (Chan 2002:754). Without logic and theory, the general tendencies identified
through quantitative analysis are incomplete. ‘‘In the absence of guidance from such logic, the data
exercises degenerate into mindless fishing expeditions and are vulnerable to spurious interpretations’’
(Chan 2002:750). Most scholars concerned with gender certainly owe a debt to Jean Bethke Elshtain
(1987), Cynthia Enloe (1989), and Ann Tickner (1992). These IR feminists shattered the publishing
boundary for feminist IR scholarship and tackled the difficult task of deconstructing IR theory, including
its founding myths, thereby creating the logic to guide feminist quantitative research. It is only through
exposure to feminist literature that one can begin to scientifically question the sexist assumptions
inherent in the dominant paradigms of international relations. Feminist theory is rife with testable
hypotheses that can only strengthen feminist IR scholarship by identifying false leads and logical errors
or by identifying general tendencies that deserve further inquiry. Without the solid body of feminist
literature that exists, quantitative feminist IR scholarship would be meaningless. The existing feminist
literature based on critical-interpretive epistemologies forms the rationale for quantitative testing. No
one methodology is superior to the others. So, why create a dichotomy if none exists? All
methodologies contribute to our knowledge, and, when put together like pieces of a puzzle, they offer
a clearer picture. The idea is to build a bridge of knowledge, not parallel walls that are equally
inadequate in their understanding of one another and in explaining international relations. Further
undermining the false dichotomization between positivist and interpretivist methodologies is the lack of
proof that quantitative methodologies cannot challenge established paradigms or, more important, that
a critical-interpretive epistemology is unbiased or more likely to uncover some truth that is supposedly
obscured by quantitative inquiry. Part of the rationale for the perpetuation of the dichotomy between
methodologies and for the critique of quantitative methodology as a valid type of feminist inquiry
involves confusing theory and practice. On a theoretical level, quantitative research is idealized as valuefree and objective, which of course it is not-particularly when applied to the social sciences. Feminists
opposed to quantitative methodologies imagine that other scholars necessarily assume such
scholarship to be objective (see Brown 1988). Few social scientists using quantitative methodologies,
however, would suggest that this methodology is value-free, which is why so much emphasis is placed
on defining measures. This procedure leaves room for debate and provides space for feminist inquiry.
For example, feminists might wish to study the effect of varying definitions of democracy and of
security on the democratic peace thesis, ultimately combining methodologies to provide a more
thorough understanding of the social matrix underlying state behavior. The second aspect
perpetuating the dichotomy between methodologies is in erroneously identifying statistics as having an
inherently masculine agenda. As Evelyn Hammonds and Helen Longina (1990) argue, feminists need to
present a clearly articulated critique of quantitative methodology demonstrating its inherent
masculinity. This association between statistics and masculinity is based on a line of feminist inquiry
that exposes the association of masculinity with objectivity and the scientific method (Keller 1983:187).
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As a result, a certain prestige in and inherent bias toward using the scientific method arises precisely
because the world is organized hierarchically based on gender (Keller 1983:202). But this belief in the
superiority of quantitative methods is socially constructed (Keller 1983; Hughes 1995). If more women
were to use the scientific method, a different science might emerge (Keller 1983; Hooper 2001). It is
unfortunate that some feminists feel the need to justify conventional feminist epistemologies because
of the apparent low status such research has. As Sandra Harding (1987:1) has argued, no distinctive
feminist methodology exists because each methodology can contribute to feminist goals. Whether or
not a traditional or feminist IR scholar runs the same statistical analysis, the numerical results should be
identical. Although the history of statistical methods might be perceived as having had questionable
motivations with its genesis rooted within a particular social, political, and economic context, this
beginning does not invalidate knowledge gained from mathematics or render the mathematics false
(Hughes 1995). The math itself is not necessarily biased. The interpretation and the measurement
used, however, are subject to debate. This fact does not reveal a flaw in the methodology but merely
indicates that data are subject to the interpretation of the scholar who must rely on theory to guide
analysis. It is true that often-used measures tend to be biased by the worldviews of the scholars who
constructed them, and that those worldviews may or may not include considerations of gender. By
largely ignoring feminist empiricist scholarship, however, conventional feminists are missing an
opportunity to make an important contribution to IR scholarship in helping identify and critique the
gendered assumptions that can affect measurement and the interpretation of results. For illustrative
purposes in highlighting the importance of being precise in our definitions and measurements, let us
examine the democratic peace thesis and the role of definitions. Feminists should join Ido Oren (1995) in
debating how democracy should be defined. Is the concept of democracy normative or a description of
the type of government found in the dominant states of our system of those that cannot be
characterized as autocratic or totalitarian? Or, perhaps, democracy should be based on political rights.
Spencer Weart (1994:302), for example, labels a state a democracy ‘‘if the body of citizens with political
rights includes at least two-thirds of the adult males.’’ Notwithstanding the one-third of adult males who
are disenfranchised, this definition completely excludes women from the analysis. Feminists might also
wish to question the following assumption: ‘‘Democratic norms have become deeply entrenched, since
many states have been democracies for long periods and principles such as true universal suffrage have
been put into practice’’ (Maoz and Russett 1993:627). What exactly is true universal suffrage, and what
are democratic norms if they exclude women’s social, economic, and political equality (see Caprioli
forthcoming-b)? Equally shocking is the statement that ‘‘in a democracy, the government rarely needs
to use force to resolve conflicts; order can be maintained without violent suppression’’ (Maoz and
Russett 1993:630). Yet, democracies routinely overlook social violence and often this violence is against
women (Broadbent 1993; Thomas 1993; Moon 1997; Caprioli 2003). By refusing to recognize
quantitative methodologies as valid, feminists fail to offer a much needed critique and
reconceptualization of current IR research such as that just described. Feminists, in essence, are, then,
not in a position to take advantage of the opportunity to directly engage the broader community of IR
scholars. Feminists offer no direct refutation of the statistics employed by IR scholars but rather of
the supposed assumption of objectivity behind the methodology . Perhaps this is because the
statistical results themselves may be irrefutable given the definitions used. Feminists argue that reality is
constructed through words (Dworkin 1974, 1979, 1987; Cohn 1987; MacKinnon 1987, 1989, 1993;
Hartsock 1989; Povinelli 1991; Milliken and Sylvan 1996). Essentially, one can only communicate ideas
that the language allows. Statistics, however, is not analogous to language and is not restrictive.
Controversy usually occurs over the rationales that are used for coding and the interpretation of results.
Definitions and predictions, however, should be open to debate, including consideration of the
alternative that women may not matter in the current structure of the international arena given the
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reality of state power. Yet, even this conclusion creates space for feminist dialogue in theorizing about
the characteristics that would need to be present for constructing a different world that includes
gender equality. So, quantitative methods could become one common approach to studying issues
important to feminists. Conventional feminists, thus, would benefit from continuing to explore how
quantitative research can further their purposes . Data, such as that provided in the UN Statistical
Yearbook, the UN Demographic Yearbook, the World Report on Economics and Social Conditions, The
World Tables, among others, are often used to further feminist goals. At the most basic level, IR
feminists argue that the exclusion and subordination of women is a global problem. We know this fact
based on dataFquantitatively derived data. Furthermore, international organizations routinely build
support for their policies, such as for micro-credit for women, based on statistics. And though largely
ignored, quantitative studies are sometimes cited if they support conventional feminist IR arguments.
For example, a study by Mark Tessler and Ina Warriner (1997) has been used to lend credence to the
argument that ‘‘reducing unequal gender hierarchies could make a positive contribution to peace and
social justice’’ (Tickner 2001:61).
Perming methodologies is best because the critique alone risks instituting new forms
of research bias—integrating viewpoints is the best way to get a full picture of IR.
Caprioli, Dept. of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, 4
[Mary, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International Studies
Review, Volume: 42, p. 260, MM]
Such a critique only serves to undermine the feminist argument against a scientific methodology for
the social sciences by questioning the scholarship of those who employ quantitative methodologies.
One does not pull variables ‘‘out of the air’’ to put into a model, thereby ‘‘adding and stirring.’’
Variables are added to models if a theoretical justification for doing so exists: the basic method of
social science remains the same: make a conjecture about causality; formulate that conjecture as an
hypothesis, consistent with established theory (and perhaps deduced from it, at least in part); specify
the observable implications of the hypothesis; test for whether those implications obtain in the real
world; and overall, ensure that one’s procedures are publicly known and replicable. Relevant evidence
has to be brought to bear on hypotheses generated by theory for the theory to be meaningful.
(Keohane 1998:196) Peterson (2002:158) postulates that ‘‘as long as IR understands gender only as an
empirical category (for example, how do women in the military affect the conduct of war?), feminisms
appear largely irrelevant to the discipline’s primary questions and inquiry.’’ Yet, little evidence actually
supports this contention unless one is arguing that gender is the only important category of analysis. If
researchers cannot add gender to an analysis, then they must necessarily use a purely femalecentered analysis, even though the utility of using a purely female centered analysis seems equally
biased. Such research would merely be gender centric based on women rather than men, and it
would thereby provide an equally biased account of international relations as those that are malecentric. Although one might speculate that having research done from the two opposing worldviews
might more fully explain international relations, surely an integrated approach would offer a more
comprehensive analysis of world affairs. Beyond a female-centric analysis, some scholars (for example,
Carver 2002) argue that feminist research must offer a critique of gender as a set of power relations.
Gender categories, however, do exist and have very real implications for individuals, social relations, and
international affairs. Critiquing the social construction of gender is important, but it fails to provide
new theories of international relations or to address the implications of gender for what happens in
the world. Sylvester (2002a) has wondered aloud whether feminist research should be focused primarily
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on critique, warning that feminists should avoid an exclusive focus on highlighting anomalies, for such a
focus does not add to feminist IR theories.
Perm – their form of analysis is not mutually exclusive with quantitative methods
intrinsic to policymaking
Caprioli, Dept. of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, 4
[Mary, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International Studies
Review, Volume: 42, p. 253-254, MM]
Quantitative methodology and feminism are not mutually exclusive . So why do feminists and why
does feminism appear to define and defend feminist scholarship based on methodology? In so doing,
feminists marginalize and devalue the applicability of quantitative research for furthering feminist
goals and, ultimately, themselves as well. Although Ann Tickner (2001) has offered a broad history of
feminist inquiry from liberal feminism to postmodernism, feminist international relations (IR)
scholarship seems to have settled into a particular mode with a narrow definition based on
methodology rather than on the contributions of the research. Even though feminist quantitative IR
research focuses on issues of social justice, particularly as it relates to women, such research is not
considered by many feminists to be part of feminist IR scholarship. Indeed, many feminists (see, for
example, Peterson 1992, 2002; Sylvester 1994; Kinsella 2003; Steans 2003) appear to reject feminist
empiricist IR scholarship predominantly because of the methodology it uses. These feminists will be
referred to in this essay as conventional feminists. It is difficult to trace the history of exclusion of
feminist IR empiricists. Empiricism is not inconsistent with feminist inquiry. It can support an activist
agenda in its commitment to freedom, equality, and self-government (Dietz 1985), and it can facilitate
the rejection of hierarchical domination, the use of military force, and other forms of exploitation
(Brock-Utne 1985). Despite these commonalities, feminist scholarship at some point became defined on
the basis of two characteristics: ‘‘an emphasis on women and a critical/interpretive epistemology’’
(Carpenter 2002:ftn. 1; emphasis added). In turn, feminist quantitative IR research (for example,
Beneria and Blank 1989; McGlen and Sarkees 1993; Caprioli 2000, 2003; Caprioli and Boyer 2001; Regan
and Paskeviciute 2003) has been devalued in comparison as ‘‘scholarship that utilizes gender in
analysis while lacking one or both other components of feminist theory’’ (Carpenter 2002:ftn. 1).
Ironically, by excluding quantitative feminist IR scholarship, conventional feminists are creating
hierarchies within a field that is focused on rejecting and deconstructing hierarchies . Moreover, the
rejection of such research seems to be accentuated within the subfield of feminist IR scholars. Perhaps
the heightened antipathy toward feminist quantitative research has arisen because quantitative
methodology has gained such wide support within the general field of international relations. The
subfield of feminist IR scholarship might be considered the last safe haven within international relations
for qualitative work. This rejection is not the case for feminist Americanists, who are permitted greater
flexibility in their choice of valid research tools. This flexibility does not preclude feminist
Americanists from using quantitative methods (see, for example, Welch and Comer 1975, 2001; Welch
and Hibbing 1992; Thomas 1994). Indeed, Sue Thomas was praised for measuring the impact of gender
on behavior in national legislatures. So as one who has been implicitly labeled insufficiently feminist, by
definition, for using quantitative methodology in the promotion of gender equality and social justice, the
present author has written this narrative to justify the use of quantitative methodology in the pursuit of
feminist IR goals. Toward that end, this essay first highlights some broad feminist contributions to
political science and to international relations. It then explores some critical errors that conventional
feminist IR scholars seem to be making. Finally, it attempts to bridge the gap between feminism and
international relations.
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Perm solves – combining trends of empirical data with the contextual analysis of
feminist methodologies accesses a more valuable form of IR
Caprioli, Dept. of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, 4
[Mary, “Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis,” International Studies
Review, Volume: 42, p. 264-266, MM]
This wrestling suggests that there may be hope that the differences among quantitative feminist,
traditional international relations, and feminist IR scholars can be reduced. Of course, it is important
that reducing such tension does not involve dismissing typical feminist methodologies as illegitimate.
The arguments raised herein have been intended to focus on the inconsistencies that result from some
feminists’ refusals to recognize feminist quantitative scholarship. But there is, truly, no need to battle
over analytical paradigms if all are useful (Fearon and Wendt 2002). Quantitative feminist studies can
provide an understanding of trends, whereas feminist methodologies provide a rich contextual
analysis . Benefits and costs attend to both types of analyses: the first offers generalizability with
limited detail; the latter provides detail with limited applicability. Both draw upon the same feminist
theories . Creating a Dialogue between Feminist and IR Scholars We should learn from the research of
feminist scholars to engage in a dialogue that can be understood. Carol Cohn (1987), for example, found
that one could not be understood or taken seriously within the national security arena without using a
masculine-gendered language. In other words, a common language is necessary to understand and be
understood. This insight could be applied to feminist research within international relations. Why not,
as Charlotte Hooper (2001:10) suggests, make ‘‘strategic use of [expert jargon] to gain credibility for
feminist arguments (or otherwise subvert it for feminist ends).’’ Little justification exists for abandoning
the liberal empiricists who reason that ‘‘the problem of developing better knowledge lies not with the
scientific method itself but with the biases in the ways in which our theories have been focused and
developed’’ (Tickner 2001:13). Building on existing feminist theoretical discourse, scholars need to
analyze the effects of inequality on the state specifically state behavior internationally. In so doing,
quantitative feminists can address the question: ‘‘Does it make any difference to states’ behavior that
their foreign and security policies are so often legitimated through appeals to various types of
hegemonic masculinity?’’ (Tickner 2001:140). Indeed, aspects of this question have already been
addressed in research (Caprioli and Boyer 2001; Caprioli 2003; Caprioli and Trumbore 2003a, 2003b)
that borrows from the democratic peace literature to argue that domestic norms of violence inherent in
structural inequality transfer to the international arena just as domestic norms of peaceful conflict
resolution are said to do. These arguments concerning structural inequality and societal violence add
further depth to the established literature that indicates the role of domestic political factors in
predicting state behavior in the international arena, thereby beginning to bridge the gap between
feminist and traditional IR scholarship. An intriguing line of feminist research might involve combining
methodologies to explain why women are found to be less likely than men to support the use of force
(Nincic and Nincic 2002) in some studies and not in others (Tessler, Nachtwey, and Grant 1999) and to
quantitatively assess the impact of a divergent type of public opinion on state behavior. In other words,
do states with the largest gender gaps regarding support for the use of force and with nominal political
equality between the sexes behave any differently internationally than do states not sharing these
characteristics? Another interesting line of quantitative feminist inquiry might examine the complexities
involved in using a broader definition of security. As Tickner (1992:22) has argued, feminism envisages
‘‘a type of security that is global and multidimensional with political, economic, and ecological facets
that are as important as its military dimensions.’’ Thus, feminism, in opposition to realism, defines
security as the elimination of all violence and unjust social relations and highlights the importance of
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cooperation and interdependence as well as stresses social concerns over military prowess. Such a
definition might lead to the following hypothesis: Are states that emphasize the elimination of violence
and unjust social relations in their domestic and foreign policies more likely to cooperate internationally
with cooperation variously defined as involvement in international organizations, adherence to
international treaties (especially those focused on human rights), willingness to end conflict through
mediation, and so on? The possibilities are truly endless and can only add to our understanding of
state behavior. Indeed, as was observed above, states with higher levels of gender equality are more
likely to support diplomacy and compromise (Tessler and Warriner 1997), exhibit lower levels of
violence when involved in international disputes (Caprioli 2000) and in international crises (Caprioli and
Boyer 2001), and are less likely to use force first during international conflict (Caprioli 2003). Feminist
IR scholars need to guard against imposing their own limitations on feminist IR scholarship , thereby
creating an inhospitable environment for the study of gender through their own challenge to
‘‘disciplinary boundaries and methods that, they believe, impose limitations on the kinds of questions
that can be asked and the ways in which they can be answered’’ (Tickner 2001:146). Feminist IR
inquiry is not incompatible with empirical inquiry and , as was suggested in the examples above, can
contribute to our knowledge about international relations in important ways.
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Perm – Realism
Perm solves and fixes the inefficiencies in feminist IR
Enloe 05 (Cynthia, Feminist and Women Studies, “Of Arms and the Women”
http://feminism.eserver.org/of-arms-and-the-woman.txt) TYBG
The first thing that must be said about the feminist critique of realism is that it is by no means
incompatible with realism, properly understood. In fact, realist theory can hardly be recognized in the
feminist caricature of it. Take the idea of the innate human propensity for conflict. Although some realist
thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau have confused the matter (often under the influence of Reinhold
Niebuhr) with misleading talk of "original sin," the controlling idea of realism is that there is an
ineradicable potential for conflict between human beings--"men" in the inclusive, gender-neutral sense- when they are organized in groups. Realism is not about conflict between individual men, that is,
males; if it were, it would be a theory of barroom brawls or adolescent male crime. It is about conflict
between rival communities, and those communities include women and men alike. Feminist critics of
realism, then, begin by attacking a straw man, or a straw male. Even worse, they tend to indulge in the
stereotypes that they otherwise abhor: aggression is "male," conciliation is "female." To their credit,
most feminist theorists are aware of this danger, ever mindful of their dogma that all sexual identity is
socially constructed, ever fearful that they will hear the cry of "Essentialist!" raised against them. Thus
Enloe, in an earlier book called Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics, struggles with how to answer what she calls "the `What about Margaret Thatcher?' taunt."
Her answer is that women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeane Kirkpatrick reinforce the patriarchy by
making international conflict look "less man-made, more people-made and thus more legitimate and
harder to reverse." Enloe applies this analysis consistently--right-wing women like Phyllis Schlafly are
pawns of the patriarchal-militarist power structure, while left-wing women like the Greenham
Common Women are disinterested proponents of the good of humanity. Still, Enloe is troubled enough
to return to the question: "some women's class aspirations and their racist fears lured them into the
role of controlling other women for the sake of imperial rule." Admit that, however, and you are close
to conceding the point about collective human behavior made by realists. Then there is "the state."
Here, too, there is nothing in realism that cannot accommodate many feminine observations about the
particular patriarchal features of particular historic states. The realist definition of "the state" as a
sovereign entity with an existence and a strategy distinct from that of individuals is very broad,
including medieval duchies and ancient empires-- and, perhaps, female biker gangs. Realist theory
holds no preference for the modern nation-state, though a word might be spoken in its defense. Again
and again in feminist writings one encounters the claim that the modern nation- state is inherently
"gendered," as though its predecessors--feudal dynastic regimes, theocratic empires, city-states, tribal
amphictyonies--were not even more rigidly patriarchal. Completely missing from such an analysis is
any acknowledgement that the successes of feminism have been largely based on appeals to the
universal norms governing citizens of the impersonal, bureaucratic nation-state. Those appeals would
have made no sense in any previous political system. Notwithstanding this, feminist scholars tend to join
free marketeers, multiculturalists and Wilsonians in their approval of the (mostly imaginary) dissolution
of the nation-state in a new world order. If the nation-state is "gendered," Enloe reasons, then perhaps
the post-national nonstate need not be: "Perhaps effective u.n. soldiering will call for a new kind of
masculinity, one less reliant on misogyny, less insecure about heterosexual credentials." (If the recent
"peacekeeping" of u.n. forces in Bosnia and Somalia shows anything, however, it is that a little more of
the old masculinity may be necessary to prevent mass slaughter--and mass rape, too.) Though realist
theory can survive, and perhaps even accommodate, many of the arguments of feminism with respect
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to collective conflict and state sovereignty, realism must reject the third aspect of the feminist criticism:
the redefinition of security to mean social justice. From the Marxist left, feminists have picked up the
argument that interstate violence is just one genre of "structural violence," which includes the economic
oppression of lower classes by upper classes (Marxism) and the subordination of women to men by
custom and by violence (feminism). But this notion merely disguises a change of subject as a change of
approach. To say that mass rape by soldiers in wartime and wife-beating in societies at peace (excuse
me, at "peace") are parts of the same phenomenon is to abandon any pretense of engaging in serious
thinking about international relations. The result may be feminist theory, but it is not a theory of world
politics. It is a theory of human society in general. When, as in "ecofeminism," the mistreatment of
women by men in all societies, in peace and at war, is fused, as a subject of analysis, with the
mistreatment of the ecosystem by humanity, one has a theory of everything, and a theory of everything
is usually not very much. If you don't know where you are going, as the old saw has it, any road will get
you there. Hence Enloe's decision to understand the Gulf war by beginning with the experiences of
Filipina maids in Kuwait. "I might get back to George Bush, Fran�ois Mitterrand, King Fahd and
Saddam Hussein eventually." Or maybe not. The results of combining an abandonment of the idea of
international politics as something that can be understood by abstracting certain aspects of reality
from the blooming, buzzing confusion of fact with an abandonment of a "positivist" effort to establish
chains of causation are amply on display in The Morning After, as in the earlier Bananas, Beaches and
Bases. These rambling exercises in free association have less in common with a monograph on a
diplomatic or military subject than with the associative and politicized writings of, say, Adrienne Rich;
they amount to a compendium of vignettes linked only by vague humanitarian sentiment and the
writer's consciousness. Enloe is grandiose in her employment of "I": "I've become aware now of the
ways in which men have used nationalism to silence women...." "Those like myself who believe that
militarism is separable from masculinity are especially interested in conscription...." "For instance, I
realize now that I know nothing--nothing--about Kurdish women." (Such personal observations, one
must admit, are refreshing compared to sentences like these: "Sexual practice is one of the sites of
masculinity's--and femininity's--daily construction. That construction is international. It has been so for
generations." Or: "Thinking about militarism in this way reminds us that we all can be militarized, as
girlfriends, fathers, factory workers or candidates.") Resolutely ignoring the world of high politics-dictators, presidents, chanceries, general staffs--Enloe devotes attention to various feminist political
groupuscles far out of proportion to their actual significance in shaping events. Thus she dwells on a
Serbian women's party that "called for respect for cultural diversity within Yugoslavia." She salutes
Danish women for voting against Maastricht and Iranian women for working to depose the Shah.
"Women Against Fundamentalism is a group formed in Britain by women who included Jews, Arab and
Asian Muslims, Hindus, white and Afro-Caribbean Protestants and Irish Catholics. It was formed in 1989,
in the turbulently gendered wake of the threats against Salman Rushdie's life...." "The first National
Conference of Nicaraguan Women was held in January 1992...." This recurrent focus on little
sisterhoods, mobilizing against "gendered" nation-states, multinational capitalism and racial and
religious prejudice, owes a lot to the Marxist dream of a transnational fraternity of workers (in a new
form, as a transnational sorority of feminists) and even more to the hope of early twentieth-century
peace crusaders such as Jane Addams that the women of the world can unite and put an end to war and
exploitation. Enloe tries to justify the attention paid to quite different groups of women in various
countries with the claim that "no national movement can be militarized"--or demilitarized?--"without
changing the ways in which femininity and masculinity infuse daily life." Even if "militarization," however
defined, does result in certain kinds of gender relations, it does not follow that altering masculine and
feminine roles will, in itself, do much to reverse the process. Something may, after all, be an effect
without being a cause. Rejecting the feminist approach to international relations does not mean
rejecting the subjects or the political values of feminist scholars. Differing notions of masculinity and
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femininity in different societies, the treatment of women and homosexuals of both sexes in the armed
forces, the exploitation of prostitutes by American soldiers deployed abroad, the sexual division of labor
both in advanced and developing countries: all of these are important topics that deserve the attention
that Enloe awards them. She shows journalistic flair as well as scholarly insight in detailing what
abstractions like the Caribbean Basin Initiative mean in the lives of women in particular Third World
countries. Still, such case studies, however interesting, do not support the claim of feminist international
relations theorists that theirs is a new and superior approach. One thing should be clear: commitment to
a feminist political agenda need not entail commitment to a radical epistemological agenda. Ideas do
not have genders, just as they do not have races or classes. In a century in which physics has been
denounced as "Jewish" and biology denounced as "bourgeois," it should be embarrassing to denounce
the study of international relations as "masculinist." Such a denunciation, of course, will not have
serious consequences in politics, but it does violence to the life of the mind. The feminist enemies of
empiricism would be well-advised to heed their own counsel and study war no more.
Realism is twisted by the feminist critique—realism and feminist IR can co-exist.
Lind 05 (Michael, Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation,
Feminism and Women’s Studies, “Of Arms and the Woman”, January 20, 2005,
http://feminism.eserver.org/of-arms-and-the-woman.txt)
The first thing that must be said about the feminist critique of realism is that it is by no means
incompatible with realism, properly understood. In fact, realist theory can hardly be recognized in the
feminist caricature of it. Take the idea of the innate human propensity for conflict. Although some
realist thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau have confused the matter (often under the influence of
Reinhold Niebuhr) with misleading talk of "original sin," the controlling idea of realism is that there is an
ineradicable potential for conflict between human beings--"men" in the inclusive, gender-neutral sense- when they are organized in groups. Realism is not about conflict between individual men, that is,
males; if it were, it would be a theory of barroom brawls or adolescent male crime. It is about conflict
between rival communities, and those communities include women and men alike. Feminist critics of
realism, then, begin by attacking a straw man, or a straw male. Even worse, they tend to indulge in the
stereotypes that they otherwise abhor: aggression is "male," conciliation is "female." To their credit,
most feminist theorists are aware of this danger, ever mindful of their dogma that all sexual identity is
socially constructed, ever fearful that they will hear the cry of "Essentialist!" raised against them. Thus
Enloe, in an earlier book called Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics, struggles with how to answer what she calls "the `What about Margaret Thatcher?' taunt."
Realist theory provides success for feminism through the state.
Lind 05 (Michael, Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation,
Feminism and Women’s Studies, “Of Arms and the Woman”, January 20, 2005,
http://feminism.eserver.org/of-arms-and-the-woman.txt)
Then there is "the state." Here, too, there is nothing in realism that cannot accommodate many
feminine observations about the particular patriarchal features of particular historic states. The realist
definition of "the state" as a sovereign entity with an existence and a strategy distinct from that of
individuals is very broad, including medieval duchies and ancient empires-- and, perhaps, female biker
gangs. Realist theory holds no preference for the modern nation-state, though a word might be spoken
in its defense. Again and again in feminist writings one encounters the claim that the modern nationstate is inherently "gendered," as though its predecessors--feudal dynastic regimes, theocratic
empires, city-states, tribal amphictyonies--were not even more rigidly patriarchal. Completely missing
from such an analysis is any acknowledgement that the successes of feminism have been largely
based on appeals to the universal norms governing citizens of the impersonal, bureaucratic nation-
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state. Those appeals would have made no sense in any previous political system. Notwithstanding this,
feminist scholars tend to join free marketeers, multiculturalists and Wilsonians in their approval of the
(mostly imaginary) dissolution of the nation-state in a new world order. If the nation-state is
"gendered," Enloe reasons, then perhaps the post-national nonstate need not be: "Perhaps effective
u.n. soldiering will call for a new kind of masculinity, one less reliant on misogyny, less insecure about
heterosexual credentials." (If the recent "peacekeeping" of u.n. forces in Bosnia and Somalia shows
anything, however, it is that a little more of the old masculinity may be necessary to prevent mass
slaughter--and mass rape, too.)
Feminist international relations can co-exist with realist interpretations of IR.
Lind 05 (Michael, Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation,
Feminism and Women’s Studies, “Of Arms and the Woman”, January 20, 2005,
http://feminism.eserver.org/of-arms-and-the-woman.txt)
Rejecting the feminist approach to international relations does not mean rejecting the subjects or the
political values of feminist scholars. Differing notions of masculinity and femininity in different
societies, the treatment of women and homosexuals of both sexes in the armed forces, the exploitation
of prostitutes by American soldiers deployed abroad, the sexual division of labor both in advanced and
developing countries: all of these are important topics that deserve the attention that Enloe awards
them. She shows journalistic flair as well as scholarly insight in detailing what abstractions like the
Caribbean Basin Initiative mean in the lives of women in particular Third World countries. Still, such case
studies, however interesting, do not support the claim of feminist international relations theorists that
theirs is a new and superior approach. One thing should be clear: commitment to a feminist political
agenda need not entail commitment to a radical epistemological agenda. Ideas do not have genders,
just as they do not have races or classes. In a century in which physics has been denounced as "Jewish"
and biology denounced as "bourgeois," it should be embarrassing to denounce the study of
international relations as "masculinist." Such a denunciation, of course, will not have serious
consequences in politics, but it does violence to the life of the mind. The feminist enemies of empiricism
would be well-advised to heed their own counsel and study war no more.
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Perm – Combinations
Only the perm can solve, the alt fails—“feminist IR” is just as marginalizing and
“mainstream IR”, only a mixture of both will be successful
Shepherd 2007
[Laura J., Department of Political Science and International Studies, University of Birmingham, “Victims,
Perpetrators and Actors’ Revisited:1 Exploring the Potential for a Feminist Reconceptualisation of
(International) Security and (Gender) Violence,” BJPIR: 2007 VOL 9, 239–256 JMR]
As Spike Peterson and Jacqui True comment, ‘our sense of self-identity and security may seem
disproportionately threatened by societal challenge to gender ordering’ (Peterson and True 1998, 17).
That is, the performance of gender is immanent in the performance of security and vice versa, both
concern issues of ontological cohesion (as illustrated in Table 2). Taking this on board leads me to the
conclusion that perhaps security is best conceived of as referring to ontological rather than existential
identity effects. Security, if seen as performative of particular configura- tions of social/political order,
is inherently gendered and inherently related to violence. Violence, on this view, performs an
ordering function—not only in the theory/practice of security and the reproduction of the
international, but also in the reproduction of gendered subjects. Butler acknowledges that ‘violence is
done in the name of preserving western values’ (Butler 2004, 231); that is, the ordering function that is
performed through the violences investigated here, as discussed above, organises political authority
and subjectivity in an image that is in keeping with the values of the powerful, often at the expense of
the marginalised. ‘Clearly, the west does not author all violence, but it does, upon suffering or
anticipating injury, marshal violence to preserve its borders, real or imaginary’ (ibid.). While Butler refers
to the violences undertaken in the protection of the sovereign state—violence in the name of security—
the preservation of borders is also recognisable in the conceptual domain of the inter- national and in
the adherence to a binary materiality of gender. This adherence is evidenced in the desire to fix the
meaning of concepts in ways that are not challenging to the current configuration of social/political
order and subjectivity, and is product/productive of ‘the exclusionary presuppositions and foundations
that shore up discursive practices insofar as those foreclose the het- erogeneity, gender, class or race of
the subject’ (Hanssen 2000, 215). However, the terms used to describe political action and plan future
policy could be otherwise imagined. They could ‘remain that which is, in the present, never fully owned,
but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from prior usage and in the direction of urgent and
expanding political purposes’ (Butler 1993, 228). The concepts both produced by and productive of
policy could reflect an aversion to essentialism, while recognising that strategic gains can be made
through the temporary binding of identities to bodies and constraining of authority within the
confines of the territorial state. This is, in short, an appeal to a politics of both/and rather than
either/or. Both the state (produced through representations of security and vio- lence) and the subject
(produced through representations of gender and violence) rely on a logic of sovereignty and
ontological cohesion that must be problematised if alternative visions of authority and subjectivity
are to become imaginable.
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Perm – State Key
Perm - Only working within the state resolves gender violence – reforming
assumptions in policy is uniquely valuable
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 11-13, MM]
Feminist theories are multidisciplinary; they draw from both the social and natural sciences as well as
the humanities and philosophy. They include a wide variety of epistemological and methodological
approaches. Although I shall outline some feminist theoretical approaches by presenting them
sequentially, it should be emphasized that many of these approaches still coexist: the debates to which
I refer are far from resolved. The key concern for feminist theory is to explain women’s subordination,
or the unjustified asymmetry between women’s and men’s social and economic positions, and to seek
prescriptions for ending it.6 Susan Okin defines feminists as those who believe that women should not
be disadvantaged by their sex; women should be recognized as having human dignity equal with men
and the opportunity to live as freely chosen lives as men.7 However, feminists disagree on what they
believe constitutes women’s subordination, as well as how to explain and overcome it. Feminist theories
have been variously described as liberal, radical, socialist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and postmodern.
8 Besides seeking better understanding of women’s subordination, most of these approaches see
themselves as politically engaged in the practical tasks of improving women’s lives. While liberal
feminists have generally relied on empiricist methodologies, other approaches have questioned these
positivist methodologies. Arguing from standpoint or postmodern epistemological positions,9 they claim
that “scientific” theories, which claim the possibility of neutrality of facts and a universalist objectivity,
hide an epistemological tradition that is gendered. Below, I outline some of the major features of these
approaches as well as their epistemological orientations, emphasizing issues that have been important
for feminist IR. Acknowledging that much of contemporary feminism has moved beyond these labels,
they are, nevertheless, helpful in understanding feminist thought in its historical context.10 It is
important to emphasize that not all feminists think alike ; the diversity in feminist scholarship is often
not recognized by IR scholars. Liberal Feminism Contemporary feminist theories have emerged out of a
long historical tradition of feminism that goes back to the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth
centuries and is associated with names such Christine de Pizan, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and
Harriet Taylor.11 Each of these theorists argued that women should have the same chance to develop
their rational capacities as men. Liberal feminism is a continuing intellectual tradition; in the United
States, it is also associated with women activists and organizations such as the National Organization for
Women (NOW). While many contemporary academic feminists have moved beyond liberal feminism, it
should not be underestimated; most reforms in Western liberal democracies that have benefitted
women can be attributed to liberal feminism. Resting on a conception of human nature that is radically
individualistic, whereby human beings are conceived as isolated individuals with no necessary
connection with each other, the liberal tradition sees humans as separate rational agents.12 Liberal
feminists claim that discrimination deprives women of equal rights to pursue their rational self-interest;
whereas men have been judged on their merits as individuals, women have tended to be judged as
female or as a group. Liberal feminists believe that these impediments to women’s exercise of their full
rational capacities can be eliminated by the removal of legal and other obstacles that have denied
them the same rights and opportunities as men. When these legal barriers are removed, they claim,
women can begin to move toward full equality. Unlike the classical liberal tradition, which argues for a
minimal state, most liberal feminists believe that the state is the proper authority for enforcing
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women’s rights; although it may engage in discrimination in practice, the state is capable of
becoming the neutral arbiter necessary to ensure women’s equality . Liberal feminism has generally
relied on positivist epistemologies typical of the analytic and empiricist traditions of knowledge that
began in seventeenth-century Europe. These knowledge traditions are based on claims that there is an
objective reality independent of our understanding of it, and that it is scientifically knowable by
detached observers whose values can remain outside their theoretical investigations. Liberal feminists
claim, however, that existing knowledge, since it has generally not included knowledge about women,
has been biased and not objective; nevertheless, they believe that this problem can be corrected by
adding women to existing knowledge frameworks. Therefore, liberal empiricists claim, the problem of
developing better knowledge lies not with the scientific method itself but with the biases in the ways in
which our theories have been focused and developed.
We must combine feminist theory with practice—critique alone only excuses the
status quo.
Byron & Thorburn 98 (Jessica Byron, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus,
Kingston, Jamaica, PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland, Diana Thorburn, lecturer in
International Relations in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Ph.D. in International Relations and
International Economics from Johns Hopkins University, “Gender and International Relations: A Global Perspective and Issues for the
Caribbean”, Feminist Review, No. 59, Summer 1998, pp 211-232)
While the fields of Feminist International Relations and feminist International Political Economy are
growing exponentially, there remains little Caribbean contribution to the debate, despite the Caribbean's leading role in the fields of
WID and GAD, and the high proportion of Caribbean diplo- mats who are women. Feminist International Relations aims to interrogate the
foundations of International Relations theory and practice, and provide feasible alternatives which would ultimately augur for a more gender
equitable world. As with Caribbean 'versions' of mainstream International Relations, Caribbean
feminist 'versions' of
International Relations must take the analysis yet a step further so that they are representative of the
realities of Caribbean gender patterns. As such, a specifically Caribbean feminist understanding of
development, integration, diplomacy- the three main issues in Caribbean International Relations would be a first step in defining the field from the Caribbean feminist perspective. Specific International
Relations issues abound and are ripe for feminist analysis, particularly as International Relations becomes more globalized. The greatest
challenge to a Caribbean Feminist International Relations, however, is that which faces the field of
Caribbean International Relations as a whole: not simply eo develop, articulate and advocate a
(Caribbean) Feminist International Relations agenda, but to effect the links between discourse and
practice. There is little correlation between scholarship and practice in Caribbean International Relations (Watson,
1994), resulting in repetitions of misguided foreign policies which maintain underdevelopment and
dependency (see warts 1994; Nurse, 1993). Whether the feminist project to humanize and engender
International Relations succeeds will depend on the relevance which feminist writers can display in
their work in the field. It will depend, equally, on the openness and progressiveness of international
relations actors and foreign policy decision makers to the 221 global feminist projece of structural change.
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No Link – Strategic Engagement
Feminists can strategically engage the State and enact reforms
Phillips 2009 , Professor of Anthropology at University of Windsor L, Cole S. Feminist Flows, Feminist
Fault Lines: Women's Machineries and Women's Movements in Latin America. Signs: Journal Of Women
In Culture & Society [serial online]. September 2009;35(1):185-211. Available from: SocINDEX with Full
Text, Ipswich, MA. Accessed July 5, 2013.
In this article we argue that feminists' willingness to integrate themselves into state democratic
machineries and mixed alternative social movements represents a strategic decision to change the
repertoire and form of feminism—not the cooptation or abeyance of feminism. Given the fluidity of
globalization and the transnational orientation of feminism today, we argue that this is not a matter
of ignoring the difference between reformist and transformative politics (Vargas 2003) but rather of
recognizing a strategic politics that engages with new (and always changing) opportunities for
broadening translations of feminism for social change. Many of those practicing feminist politics have
found a way of working across difference while utilizing the discourse of human rights. As globalization
has restructured gendered political opportunities and resources in complex ways, human rights
discourses "now take a hybridized rather than a purely Western form" (Walby 2002, 535; cf. Mohanty
1991; Ong 2006). This is why it is important not to interpret feminist politics outside their contexts,
assuming, for example, that a human rights discourse reflects a turn to individualist or liberal
feminism. Rather, as Walby concludes, "the notion that women's rights are human rights is an addition
to the polidcal repertoire of feminists" (2002, 549; emphasis added), a repertoire that needs to be
located and understood in context.
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No Link – State
The state isn’t patriarchal- it’s actually key to promoting women rights
Rhode 94 (Deborah L., Professor of Law, Stanford University, B.A., J.D., Director, Keck Center on Legal
Ethics and the Legal Profession, APRIL, 1994 “Symposium: Changing Images of the State: Feminism and
the State”, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1181, Lexis) TYBG
This account is also problematic on many levels. To treat women as a class obscures other
characteristics, such as race and economic status, that can be equally powerful in ordering social
relations. Women are not "uniformly oppressed." n22 Nor are they exclusively victims. Patriarchy
cannot account adequately for the mutual dependencies and complex power dynamics that
characterize male-female relations. Neither can the state be understood solely as an instrument of
men's interests. As a threshold matter, what constitutes those interests is not self-evident, as
MacKinnon's own illustrations suggest. If, for example, policies liberalizing abortion serve male
objectives by enhancing access to female sexuality, policies curtailing abortion presumably also serve
male objectives by reducing female autonomy. n23 In effect, patriarchal frameworks verge on
tautology. Almost any gender-related policy can be seen as either directly serving men's immediate
interests, or as compromising short-term concerns in the service of broader, long-term goals, such as
"normalizing" the system and stabilizing power relations. A framework that can characterize all state
interventions as directly or indirectly patriarchal offers little practical guidance in challenging the
conditions it condemns. And if women are not a homogenous group with unitary concerns, surely the
same is true of men. Moreover, if the state is best understood as a network of institutions with complex,
sometimes competing agendas, then the patriarchal model of single-minded instrumentalism seems
highly implausible. It is difficult to dismiss all the anti-discrimination initiatives of the last quarter
century as purely counter-revolutionary strategies. And it is precisely these initiatives, with their appeal
to "male" norms of "objectivity and the impersonality of procedure, that [have created] [*1186]
leverage for the representation of women's interests." n24 Cross-cultural research also suggests that
the status of women is positively correlated with a strong state , which is scarcely the relationship
that patriarchal frameworks imply. n25 While the "tyrannies" of public and private dependence are
plainly related, many feminists challenge the claim that they are the same. As Carole Pateman notes,
women do not "live with the state and are better able to make collective struggle against institutions
than individuals." n26 To advance that struggle, feminists need more concrete and contextual accounts
of state institutions than patriarchal frameworks have supplied. Lumping together police, welfare
workers, and Pentagon officials as agents of a unitary patriarchal structure does more to obscure than
to advance analysis. What seems necessary is a contextual approach that can account for greater
complexities in women's relationships with governing institutions. Yet despite their limitations,
patriarchal theories underscore an insight that generally informs feminist theorizing. As Part II reflects,
governmental institutions are implicated in the most fundamental structures of sex-based inequality and
in the strategies necessary to address it.
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No Link – Reform
Reforming assumptions within the state is key – spillover
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 45-46, MM]
Although certain of these scholars see an incommensurability between rationalist and interpretive
epistemologies, others are attempting to bridge this gap by staying within realism’s state-centric
worldview while questioning its rationalist epistemology. Ronald Jepperson, Alexander Wendt, and
Peter Katzenstein have argued for what they call “sociological institutionalism”— a view that
advocates an identity-based approach, but one that stays within the traditional security agenda, a
focus on states , and explanatory social science. Where this approach differs from rationalism is in its
investigation of how norms, institutions, and other cultural features of domestic and international
environments affect states’ security interests and policies. Conversely, when states enact a particular
identity, they have a profound effect on the international system to which they belong.36 Alexander
Wendt’s constructivist approach also attempts to bridge the constructivist/rationalist divide. His
strategy for building this bridge is to argue against the neorealist claim that self-help is given by anarchic
structures. If we live in a self-help world, it is due to process rather than structure; in other words,
“ anarchy is what states make of it. ”37 Constructivist social theory believes that “people act toward
objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the objects have for them.”38 People
and states act differently toward those they perceive as friends and those they see as enemies.
Therefore, we cannot understand states’ security interests and behavior without considering issues of
identity placed within their social context.
Criticisms of IR fail without a founding in realism
Saloom 6 (Rachel, JD Univ of Georgia School of Law and M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from U of
Chicago, A Feminist Inquiry into International Law and International Relations, 12 Roger Williams U. L.
Rev. 159) TYBG
Tickner's last point that deserves further reflection is the notion that international law and international
relations will not become free from gender bias as long as we live in a gendered world. This is not to say
that small steps are ineffective, but rather that international law and international relations are merely
a small part of the larger systemic problem of unequal gender relations. While it is desirable that
more women occupy foreign and military policy making positions, this "desire" does not necessarily
transform the way international law and international relations work. To allege that this is the case
assumes that women have an essential character that can transform the system. This of course is
contrary to the very arguments that most gender theorists forward, because it would mean that
women have some unique "feminine" perspective. What is needed then is a release from the sole
preoccupation on women and men. The state's masculinist nature that gender theorists critique affects
everyone in society. Moving beyond the "add and stir" approach is quite difficult, but there must be a
starting point from which gender theorists can work. 105 If everything is problematized, paralysis will
inevitably occur. Working within the current framework is truly the only option to bring about change.
Lofty abstract criticisms will do nothing to change the practices of international law and international
relations. Pragmatic feminist criticisms of international law and international relations, however,
should be further developed. Even advocates of realist thought will admit that realism is neither the
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most accurate nor the only way to view the world. 106 The changing dynamics of world politics make
formulating new ways of understanding international relations quite pertinent. Keeping some
semblance of realism in tact, while at the same time opening up space for theorizing about other
possibilities, is necessary. Critics are quick to note that realism cannot be easily abandoned without
some sort of alternative framework. Casting aside realism now, even given the concerns of gender
scholars, is not the most promising option. Wayman and Diehl note that [*180] "the abandonment of
realism leaves a void, which in the short to medium term is at least as much of a dead end as would
be the result of following realism." 107 New possibilities can be envisioned while still adhering to
some of the realist ideologies. Wayman and Diehl describe realism as a detour and not a definitive road
map. 108 Thus, theorists must admit that realism is not the only way or the correct way to view
international law and international relations, but it cannot be totally abandoned. Even given all of the
criticisms of feminist theories, there must be space, however, for feminist theorization. A pragmatic
approach should not dismiss the benefits of theorizing. Discussions and debates on feminism and
international law and relations are extremely important. Yet even where feminist discourses lack the
social power to realize their versions of knowledge in institutional practices, they can offer the discursive
space from which the individual can resist dominant subject positions... . Resistance to the dominant at
the level of the individual subject is the first stage in the production of alternative forms of knowledge,
or, where such alternatives already exist, of winning individuals over to these discourses and gradually
increasing their social power. 109 Therefore, feminist theorizing is a meaningful first step in the right
direction to bring about change and sites of resistance. A pragmatic feminist approach would then
take this theorizing to the next level to bring about real change.
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Materialism Turn
Feminism’s focus on gender as a social construction ignores the material conditions
that separate each individuals lived experience
Cheah, 96. graduate student in English at Cornell University, 1996 [Pheng, Review Essay: Mattering,
Diacritics 26.1, Project Muse]
In the immediate instance, Grosz's and Butler's return to the body can be understood as a reaction to
the inadequacies of social constructionism as a paradigm for feminist theory. Simply put, social
constructionism espouses the primacy of the social or discourse as constructive form over preexisting
matter which is said to be presignificative or nonintelligible. Butler and Grosz are critical of this position
for various reasons. For Butler, social constructionism oscillates between two untenable positions. In
presupposing and so retroactively installing the category of "nature" in the prelinguistic position of a
tabula rasa, social constructionism can consider sex either as natural and thus unconstructed or as the
fictional premise of a prediscursive ground produced by the concept of gender [6]. In the first scenario,
sex cannot be accounted for and political contestation is confined to the level of gender conceived as
the interpretation or meaning [End Page 109] of sex. The second scenario leads either to a linguistic
monism that cannot explain how the bodily materiality of sex can be produced by language/discourse or
to the anthropomorphizing of "construction" into a nominative subject endowed with the power of selfcausation and causing everything else. Grosz points out that feminists concerned with the social
construction of subjectivity recode the mind/body opposition as a distinction between biology and
psychology and locate political transformation in psychological change where the body either is
irrelevant or becomes the vehicle expressing changes in beliefs and values [17]. This effectively ignores
the point that the body is a unique social, cultural, and political object. It also bears the mark of
differences (sex and race) that are not easily revalued through consciousness-raising precisely because
they are material differences which are not eradicable without disfiguring the body [18].
This destroys women’s agency—relegating them to another form of masculine
domination
Cheah, 96. graduate student in English at Cornell University, 1996 [Pheng, Review Essay: Mattering,
Diacritics 26.1, Project Muse]
As Grosz observes in her succinct account of Cartesianism, a mechanistic understanding of the body is
harmful to feminist theory because it deprives women's bodies of agency by reducing the body to a
passive object, seen as a tool or instrument of an intentional will rather than a locus of power and
resistance [9]. But while a teleological account of nature invests bodies with activity, this activity is
always the predication of intelligible form. This can lead to a biological-deterministic justification for
the oppression of women particularly because the form/matter distinction originating from Greek
philosophy is always articulated through a gendered matrix where the productive or creative agency
of form is associated with a masculine principle while matter, which is passively shaped, is coded as
feminine [Grosz 5; Butler, ch. 1]. Thus, Butler suggests that "[w]e may seek a return to matter as prior
to discourse to ground our claims about sexual difference only to discover that matter is fully
sedimented with discourses on sex and sexuality that prefigure and constrain the uses to which the
term can be put" [29]. One might further argue that despite the Cartesian sundering of intelligence from
nature in the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa as ontologically different substances,
Cartesian and Greek ontology are continuous insofar as the form/matter and mind/matter distinctions
are subtended by a common opposition between intelligent activity and brute passivity. In a mechanistic
understanding of nature, the form/matter distinction which was interior to bodies in Greek ontology
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becomes an external relation, either practical-causal or theoretical-contemplative, between rational
consciousness and objective exteriority. Thus, by rethinking the body as something invested with a
transformative dynamism or agency, Butler and Grosz also question the pertinence of the oppositions
between intelligible form and brute matter, culture/history and nature.
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Essentialism Turn
Must be case-by case – essentializing the feminine diminishes potential for reform –
their method is unquantifiable
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 20, MM]
In a critique of trends in women’s studies in the 1990s, Renate Klein claims that the new focus on
gender studies threatens to make women invisible again; a lack of connection to the real lives of
women endangers the political project of women’s emancipation . Klein suggests that while we need
to listen to women from other cultures, we must focus not only on difference, but on commonalities.45
Agreeing with early critics of liberal feminism that the removal of legal barriers will not end women’s
subordination, many contemporary feminists are urging a sensitivity to difference and a respect for
contextual knowledge that does not lose sight of the emancipatory goals to which various feminist
approaches have been committed. This overview suggests a multiplicity of feminist approaches. Rosi
Braidotti describes feminism not as a canonized body of theories but a widely divergent, sometimes
contradictory, amalgam of positions.46 For IR, a discipline that has been concerned with cumulation
and working toward a unified body of theory defined in terms of propositions that can be tested, this
array of positions appears unsettling . Indeed, the concerns and debates in feminist theory that I have
outlined seem far from the agenda of conventional IR. These positions have, however, been central to
providing important insights and guidance for IR feminists as these scholars have constructed feminist
critiques of the discipline and begun to develop feminist research programs.
Alt fails – collapses into generalizing (this card also takes out the aff) – could be a K aff
card against the K
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 27-28, MM]
In her assessment of the potential for finding a space in IR for feminist theory in the realist and liberal
approaches of the interparadigm debate, Sandra Whitworth has suggested that, to incorporate gender,
theories must satisfy three criteria: (1) they must allow for the possibility of talking about the social
construction of meaning; (2) they must discuss historical variability; and (3) they must permit
theorizing about power in ways that uncover hidden power relations. Whitworth claims that, in terms
of these three criteria, there is little in realism that seems conducive to theorizing about gender .76
The liberal paradigm that has sought to enlarge concerns beyond the state-centric, national-security
focus of realism might seem more promising; however, according to Whitworth, it is ahistorical and
denies the material bases of conflict, inequality, and power. Introducing women and gender to the
liberal paradigm would also encounter the same problems noted by critics of liberal feminism.
Attempts to “bring women into IR” feed into the mistaken assumption that they are not there in the
first place . As Cynthia Enloe tells us, women (as well as marginalized people more generally) are highly
involved in world politics, but existing power structures, institutionalized in the split between the
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public and private spheres and what counts as “important,” keep them from being heard.77
Whitworth concludes by suggesting that critical theory is the most promising approach for feminist IR.
Writing in 1989, Whitworth noted that the critical approach was, at that time, still quite
underdeveloped; she also suggested that creating a space within critical theory would not launch
gender analysis into the mainstream of IR, since critical theory is as much on the periphery as feminist
analysis. While critical theory has become more developed and recognized in IR since 1989, in the
United States at least, it remains on the margins. Although not all IR feminists would identify
themselves as critical theorists, most would define themselves as postpositivists in terms of the
characterization of positivism outlined above. With a preference for hermeneutic, historically based,
humanistic, and philosophical traditions of knowledge cumulation, rather than those based on the
natural sciences, IR feminists are often skeptical of empiricist methodologies, for reasons mentioned
above. While they are generally committed to the emancipatory potential of theory, which can help to
understand structures of domination, particularly gender structures of inequality, they are suspicious of
Enlightenment knowledge, which they claim has been based on knowledge about, and produced by,
men—a claim that seems particularly true of the discipline of international relations.
Turn – the K’s essentialization of the male as belligerent and the female as peaceful
collapses into patriarchy – turns the K
Tickner, feminist IR theorist and a distinguished scholar in residence at the School of
International Services, American University, 01
[J. Ann, Gendering World Politics, p. 59-60, MM]
In a context of a male-dominated society, the association of men with war and women with peace
also reinforces gender hierarchies and false dichotomies that contribute to the devaluation of both
women and peace. The association of women and peace with idealism in IR, which I have argued is a
deeply gendered concept, has rendered it less legitimate in the discourse of international relations.
Although peace movements that have relied on maternal images may have had some success, they do
nothing to change existing gender relations; this allows men to remain in control and continue to
dominate the agenda of world politics, and it continues to render women’s voices as inauthentic in
matters of foreign policymaking. An example of the negative consequences of associating women with
peace is Francis Fukuyama’s discussion of the biological roots of human aggression and its association
with war. Fukuyama claims that women are more peaceful than men—a fact that, he believes, for the
most part is biologically determined. Therefore, a world run by women would be a more peaceful world.
However, Fukuyama claims that only in the West is the realization of what he calls a “feminized” world
likely; since areas outside the West will continue to be run by younger aggressive men, Western men,
who can stand up to threats posed by dangers from outside, must remain in charge, particularly in the
area of international politics.79 Besides its implications for reinforcing a disturbing North/South split,
this argument is deeply conservative; given the dangers of an aggressive world, women must be kept
in their place and out of international politics.80 The leap from aggressive men to aggressive states is
also problematic. There is little evidence to suggest that men are “naturally” aggressive and women
are “naturally” peaceful; as bell hooks reminds us, black women are very likely to feel strongly that
white women have been quite violent and militaristic in their support of racism .81 Traditional
concepts of masculinity and femininity that sustain war require an exercise of power: they are not
inevitable. 82
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Western Feminism K
Western feminist writings support the superiority of the west that creates a harmful
third world women universal
Mohanty 1984 [Chandra Talpade. professor of Women's and Gender Studies, "Under Western Eyes:
Feminist Scholarship And Colonial Discourses." Boundary 2 12/13.3/1 (1984): 333-358. Academic Search
Complete.]
What happens when this assumption of "women as an oppresed group" is situated in the context of
Western feminist writing about third world women? It is here that I locate the colonialist move. By
focusing on the representation of women in the third world, and what I refered to earlier as Western
feminisms' self-presentation in the same context, it seems evident that Western feminists alone
become the true "subjects" of this counter-history. Third world women, on the other hand, never rise
above their generality and their "object" status. While radical and liberal feminist assumptions of
women as a sex class might elucidate (however inadequately) the autonomy of particular women's
struggles in the West, the application of the notion of women as a homogeneous category to women in
the third world colonizes and appropriates the pluraiities of the simultaneous location of different
groups of women in social class and ethnic frameworks. Similarly, many Zed Press authors, who ground
themselves in the basic analytic strategies of traditional marxism also implicitly create a "unity" of
women by substituting "women's activity" for "labor" as the primary theoretical determinant of
women's situation. Here again, women are constituted as a coherent group not on the basis of "natural"
qualities or needs, but on the basis of the sociological "unity" of their role in domestic production and
wage labor." In other words. Western feminist discourse, by assuming women as a coherent, already
constituted group which is placed in kinship, legal and other structures, defines third world women as
subjects outside of social relations, instead of looking at the way women are constituted as women
through these very structures. Legal, economic, religious, and familial structures are treated as
phenomena to be judged by Western standards, it is here that ethnocentric universality comes into
play. When these structures are defined as "underdeveloped" or "developing" and women are placed
within these structures, an implicit image of the "average third world woman" is produced. This is the
transformation of the (implicitly Western) "oppressed woman" into the "oppressed third world woman."
While the category of "oppressed woman" is generated through an exclusive focus on gender
difference, "the oppressed third world woman" category has an additional attribute—the "third world
difference!" The "third world difference" includes a paternalistic attitude towards women in the third
world."' Since discussions of the various themes I identified earlier (e.g., kinship, education, religion,
etc.) are conducted in the context of the relative "underdeveiopment" of the third world (which is
nothing less than unjustifiably confusing development with the separate path taken by the West in its
development, as well as ignoring the directionality of the first-third world power relationship), third
world women as a group or category are automatically and necessarily defined as: religious (read "not
progressive"), family-oriented (read "traditional"), legal minors (read "they-are-still-not-conscious-oftheir- rights"), illiterate (read "ignorant"), domestic (read "backward") and sometimes revolutionary
(read "their-country-is-in-a-state-of-war-they- must-fight!"). This is how the "third world difference" is
produced. When the category of "sexually oppressed women" is located within particular systems in the
third world which are defined on a scale which is normed through Eurocentric assumptions, not only are
third world women defined in a particular way prior to their entry into social relations, but since no
connections are made between first and third world power shifts, it reinforces the assumption that
people in the third world just have not evolved to the extent that the West has. This mode of feminist
analysis, by homogenizing and systematizing the experiences of different groups of women in these
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countries, erases all marginal and resistant modes of experiences. It is significant that none of the texts I
reviewed in the Zed Press series focuses on lesbian politics or the politics of ethnic and religious
marginal groups in third world women's groups. Resistance can thus only be defined as cumulatively
reactive, not as something inherent in the operation of power. If power, as Michel Foucault has argued
recently, can really be understood only in the context of resistance," this misconceptualization of power
is both analytically as well as strategically problematical. It limits theoretical analysis as well as
reinforcing Western cultural imperialism. For in the context of a first/third world balance of power,
feminist analyses which perpetrate and sustain the hegemony of the idea of the superiority of the
West produce a corresponding set of universal images of the "third world woman," images like the
veiled woman, the powerful mother, the chaste virgin, the obedient wife, etc. These images exist in
universal, ahistorical splendor, setting in motion a colonialist discourse which exercises a very specific
power in defining, coding and maintaining existing first/third world connections.
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Tickner Indict
Tickner’s analysis of IR relies on false dichotomies and mischaracterizations of
conventional IR research
Keohane 98 (Robert O., Duke University, March 1998 “Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations Between
International Relations and Feminist Theory”. International Studies Quarterly 42, 193-198) TYBG
What I will argue here is that Professor Tickner herself relies too much on three key dichotomies, which
seem to me to have misleading implications, and to hinder constructive debate. The first of these
dichotomies contrasts "critical theory" with "problem-solving" theory. "Problem-solving [theory] takes
the world as it finds it and implicitly accepts the prevailing order as its framework" (1997:619). The
second dichotomy pits "hermeneutic, historically-based, humanistic and philosophical traditions"
against positivist epistemologies modeled on the natural sciences. Finally, Tickner contrasts a view
that emphasizes the social construction of reality with an atomistic, asocial conception of behavior
governed by the laws of nature (1997:616, 618-9). International relations theory is portrayed as
problem-solving, positivist, and asocial; feminist theory as critical, post-positivist, and sociological.
These dichotomies have some rhetorical force; arguably, recent international relations theory has been
insufficiently critical, too committed to covering law epistemology, and too mechanistic and asocial, in
its reliance on states as actors and on economic logic to analyze their behavior. But few major IR
theorists fit the stereotype of being at the problem-solving, positivist, and asocial ends of all three
dichotomies. As Tickner herself points out, Hans J. Morgenthau had a deeply normative purpose: to
prevent the recurrence of war generated by ideologies such as fascism and communism. Since
Morgenthau was a refugee from Nazism, he hardly accepted the prevailing world order of the late 1930s
and early 1940s as the framework for his analysis! Kenneth N. Waltz, the leader in neorealist theory, has
famously relied on "socialization" as a major (although insufficiently specified) process in world politics,
which makes him a poor candidate for a proponent of "asocial" theories. And Stephen Walt--one of
Tickner's targets--has been highly critical of game-theoretic methodology. The problem with Tickner's
dichotomies, however, goes much deeper. The dichotomies should be replaced by continua, with the
dichotomous characterizations at the poles. Each analyst of world politics has to locate herself or
himself somewhere along the dimensions between critical and problem-solving theory, nomothetic
and narrative epistemology, and a social or structural conception of international relations. In my
view, none of the ends of these continua are the optimal places to rest one's perspective. Criticism of
the world, by itself, becomes a jeremiad, often resting implicitly on a utopian view of human potential.
Without analysis, furthermore, it constitutes merely the opinion of one or a number of people. On the
other hand, implicit or complacent acceptance of the world as it is would rob the study of international
relations of much of its meaning. How could one identify "problems" without criticism at some level?
The issue is not problem-solving vs. critical theory--a convenient device for discarding work that one
does not wish to accept--but how deeply the criticism should go. For example, most students of war
study it because they hope to expose its evils or to control it in some way: few do so to glorify war as
such. But the depth of their critique varies. Does the author reject certain acts of warfare, all warfare, all
coercion, or the system of states itself? The deeper the criticism, the more wide-ranging the questions.
Narrowly problem-solving work, as in much policy analysis, often ignores the most important causal
factors in a situation because they are not manipulable in the short run. However, the more critical
and wide-ranging an author's perspective, the more difficult it is to do comparative empirical analysis.
An opponent of some types of war can compare the causes of different wars, as a way to help to
eliminate those that are regarded as pernicious; but the opponent of the system of states has to imagine
the counterfactual situation of a system without states. The second dichotomy--positivist vs. post-
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positivist--is also misleading. There is a wide range of adherence, in international relations, to more or
less nomothetic theoretical claims, and to aspirations of greater or less adherence to canons
associated with natural science. Scientific success is not the attainment of objective truth, but the
attainment of wider agreement on descriptive facts and causal relationships, based on transparent and
replicable methods. Even those who seek scientific generalization recognize the importance of
descriptive work, and of investigating issues that are not amenable to statistical analysis, due to their
complexity, contingency, and lack of homogeneity between the units to be compared (King, Keohane,
and Verba, 1994). No serious students of international relations expect to discover meaningful universal
laws that operate deterministically, since they recognize that no generalization is meaningful without
specification of its scope conditions. The point is that a sophisticated view of science overcomes the
objectivist-subjectivist dichotomy, and forces the investigator to make interrelated choices about
purposes, subject matter, and methods. One can recognize that knowledge is socially constructed
without giving up on efforts to widen intersubjective agreement about important issues, and to specify
more fully the conditions under which some important outcomes are more or less likely to occur. For
instance, our current knowledge of the conditions under which various strategies in international crises
lead to war or settlement (Gelpi, 1997; Huth, 1996) is surely an advance over aphorisms such as "to
achieve peace, prepare for war," or "deterrence does (or does not) work." But it would be foolish to
believe that one could understand the Cuban Missile Crisis simply on the basis of generalizations,
however valid, about crisis management. Narratives, and an understanding of personal psychology, play
an essential role in understanding unique events. Finally, the social-asocial dichotomy is misleading
because social behavior consists of individual choices constrained by social, economic, and political
structures, and by institutions. Choices are made on the basis of normative, descriptive, and causal
beliefs, all of which are deeply socially constructed. It is a platitude that our beliefs are culturally
conditioned and transmitted. Hence all human action is in a profound sense social. Yet as Marx said,
people make their own history, but not "as they please." Choices are made within structures of
demography, material scarcity, and power--and within institutions that affect the incentives and
opportunities available to actors, as well as constraining them. It seems ill-advised to locate oneself on
the extreme end of any of these three continua: it is not sensible to choose between critical and
problem-solving theory; commitment to nomothetic, objective science and attention to particularity;
emphasis on social construction of reality and on constraints--material, political, and institutional.
Aspects of all of these loci of attention can enrich the study of international relations. On each
continuum, trade-offs exist: movements along the continuum achieve gains on one dimension, but incur
losses on another. Where to locate oneself depends, among other things, on the condition of world
politics at the moment, the state of our knowledge of the issues, and the nature of the problem to be
investigated.