Shell
The affirmative relies on realism to explain world events… the idea that we go
to war in order to secure peace is the logic that silences the structural violence
that impacts women everyday… this type of knowledge production is
fundamentally violent.
Ayotte and Husain 05 [Kevin J, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at
the California State University and Mary E, lecturer in the Department of Communication at the
California State University, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and
the Rhetoric of the Veil, p. 112-113]
The concept of “security” has not always been considered particularly problematic in the study
of international relations. For much of the twentieth century, and to a significant degree today,
much of the theory and practice of international relations has been conducted from within the
perspective of political realism, realpolitik, or its derivative, neorealism (Desch 1996, 361;
Vasquez 1983, 160–72). Within the realist paradigm, security flows from power, specifically
state power and military strength. Recent feminist scholarship has challenged this notion of
security on the grounds that women have never been secure r within (or without) the nation
state—they are always disproportionately affected by war, forced migration, famine, and
other forms of social, political, and economic turmoil (Mohanty 2002, 514; Tickner 2001, 50–1).
The statist theoretical framework of political realism is thus inadequate to explain the myriad
conditions that make women insecure in the world today. In the wake of the “war on
terrorism” and its mobilization of women’s bodies to justify U.S. military intervention in
Afghanistan, feminist analyses of international relations must broaden the concept of
security, in J. Ann Tickner’s words, to “seek to understand how the security of individuals and
groups is compromised by violence, both physical and structural” (2001, 48). To the types of
violence examined by feminist international relations scholarship, we would add the concept of
epistemic violence (see Spivak 1999, 266). While the physical and structural violence inflicted
upon women must remain a central component of feminist theory and criticism, the war on
terrorism in Afghanistan also demonstrates that the Western appropriation and
homogenization of third-world women’s voices perform a kind of epistemic violence that
must be addressed along with material oppressions.1 This essay argues that representations of
the women of Afghanistan as gendered slaves in need of “saving” by the West constitute
epistemic violence, the construction of a violent knowledge of the third world Other that
erases women as subjects in international relations. In claiming to secure Afghan women from
the oppression of the Taliban, the United States has reinscribed an ostensibly benevolent
paternalism of which we should remain wary. In particular, the image of the Afghan woman
shrouded in the burqa has played a leading role in various public arguments seeking to justify
U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. This rhetorical construction
of Afghan women as objects of knowledge legitimized U.S. military intervention under the
rubric of “liberation” at the same time that it masked the root causes of structural violence in
Afghanistan. The pursuit of gender security must therefore account for the diverse ways in
which the neocolonialism of some Western discourses about third-world women creates the
epistemological conditions for material harm. Although the distinctions among epistemic,
physical, and structural violence in this article allow for analytic precision in the sense that these
forms of violence are indeed different in kind, we must recognize their complicitous
relationship.
Masculine views of IR exclude other possible solutions, that makes warfare and
policy failure inevitable—Iraq proves
Lieberfeld 5 [Daniel, Associate Professor of Social and Political Policy @ Duquesne University,
PhD in IR from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, “THEORIES OF CONFLICT AND THE IRAQ
WAR”, International Journal of Peace Studies, Volume 10, Number 2, Autumn/Winter 2005,
http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol10_2/wLieberfeld10n2IJPS.pdf]
Some observers have also located motives for the invasion decision in Bush’s relationship with
his father: Given the continual comparisons with his father within the Bush family, and how
far he was from being a self-made man, Bush junior may have felt compelled to prove himself
by surpassing his father and overthrowing Hussein, which his father had rejected doing after
the 1991 Gulf war. Moreover, going to war with Iraq may have enhanced the younger Bush’s
sense of his own virility, given his sensitivity to the fact that his father had been publicly
labeled a “wimp” (Schweizer and Schweizer, 2004, 388; see also Woodward, 2004, 421).
Feminist theories of international relations highlight the causal role of gender in war. These
theories generally assume that increasing women’s roles in governance and public
decisionmaking would lessen war and violence. Such theories might account for the invasion
decision with reference to key administration members’ sense of masculinity and to gendered
images of the adversary (see Cohn, 1993), or to the relative absence of women (pace
Condoleezza Rice) from the highest levels of decision-making authority. Interpretations stressing
motivated biases posit that Bush and his inner circle were genuinely convinced that Iraq was a
major threat and that, due to their emotional and cognitive predispositions, they seized on
ambiguous intelligence information as confirmation of their biases. Such interpretations stand
in contrast to the possibility that the administration deliberately deceive d Congress and the
public regarding an Iraqi threat that they knew to be minor or non-existent. The
administration’s miscalculations—underestimating the al-Qaeda threat before 9/11,
overestimating Iraq’s weapons capabilities and intentions, underestimating the costs of an
invasion and the potential for an anti-U.S. insurgency, as well as overestimating the degree to
which other countries would bandwagon with the U.S. in the wake of the invasion—were
probably facilitated by conformity of opinion among the inner circle of decisionmakers and the
exclusion of outside expert advice. This facilitated a groupthink process (Janis, 1972) in which
the members of the tight decisionmaking circle around Bush minimized the risks of an
invasion. The absence of genuine debate and the presence of “mindguards” like Cheney who
protect leaders from dissenting opinions (see, e.g., Suskind, 2004a, 76) create the conditions for
groupthink, in which group members’ independent and rational judgment is overridden by
pressures to defer to the perceived preferences of a higher-ranking leader. Groupthink
typically involves overestimating the group’s chances of success and the righteousness of its
cause, while neglecting to test assumptions about policy options and, consequently,
underestimating their drawbacks and vulnerabilities. Bush’s personality predisposes him
toward certainty, rather than nuanced reflection, introspection, or self-criticism (Suskind,
2004b). This trait may have led him to expect an easy victory in Iraq. Bush’s faith may have also
constituted a motivated bias that led Bush to minimize risks and to favor a policy of
confrontation. Bush’s lack of cognitive complexity—the capacity to view groups, policies, and
ideas in differentiated terms and the disinclination to monolithic views and interpretations
(Hermann, 1977, 167)—and his personal history as a former alcoholic turned evangelical, may
also have predisposed him to think and behave in ways that enhanced the attractiveness of war
as a policy option (Schweizer and Schweizer, 2004, 517). While the groupthink hypothesis may
explain why group members fail to challenge a preferred policy’s flawed assumptions, it does
not account for the origins of the particular policy whose flaws go unrecognized: In this case
groupthink does not explain why administration leaders were considering an invasion option in
the first place. Implications of Ideological and Non-rational Influences Theories address causality
on a fundamental level only if they address why the invasion policy was under consideration in
the first place. While President Bush had personal motives for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,
personality traits should not necessarily be considered causal. For example, although Bush’s
religious beliefs and his lack of cognitive complexity may be relevant factors, the connection
with Iraq is imprecise. Such traits may have facilitated approval of the invasion policy but were
not responsible for its emergence and its prominence. One may with more confidence view
Bush’s personal animosity toward Iraq’s ruler as another tipping factor that made the invasion
policy more attractive. If U.S. society exhibits a perennial need for an external enemy, in part
due to widespread nationalist attitudes, then the convergence of Christian evangelical and
Zionist ideologies in the U.S. perhaps helps explain the choice of Iraq, rather than a different
target. At the societal level, and among political elites, a sense of national chosenness and
superiority, as well as racism, may make the U.S. more war-prone in the Middle East, due to
evangelicals’ beliefs about the Holy Land, and due to domestic political incentives for
championing Israel. Ideological beliefs may have rendered U.S. leaders more susceptible to
manipulation by those like Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, or the government of Ariel Sharon in
Israel, which may have fed the U.S. false intelligence reports about Iraqi weapons in order to
promote a U.S. invasion that served their own political agendas.
The alternative is to vote negative. In questioning the masculine conceptions of
the 1AC we are able to embrace a feminist ethic that challenges the inequalities
and violence of the status quo
Moghadam 01 [Valentine: feminist scholar and author, “Violence and Terrorism: Feminist
Observations on Islamist Movements, State, and the International System” Comparative Studies
of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 21.1-2, Project Muse]
Our world desperately needs new economic and political frameworks in order to end the
vicious cycle of violence and bring about people-oriented development, human security, and
socio-economic justice, including justice for women. Such frameworks are being proposed in
international circles, whether by some UN circles, the antiglobalization movement, or the global
feminist movement. Women's peace movements in particular constitute an important
countermovement to terrorism, and they should be encouraged and funded. Feminists and
women's groups have long been involved in peace work, and their analyses and activities have
contributed much to our understanding of the roots of conflict and the conditions for conflict
resolution, human security, and human development. There is now a prodigious feminist
scholarship that describes this activism while also critically analyzing international relations from
various disciplinary vantage points, including political science.° The activities of antimilitarist
groups such as the Women's international League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Women
Strike for Peace, and the Women of Greenham Common are legendary, and their legacy lies in
ongoing efforts to "feminize" peace, human rights, and development. At the third UN
conference on women, in Nairobi in 1985, women decided that not only equality and
development, but also peace and war were their affairs.° The Nairobi conference took place in
the midst of the crisis of Third World indebtedness and the implementation of austerity policies
recommended by the World Bank and the IME Feminists were quick to see the links between
economic distress, political instability, and violence against women. As Lucille Mair noted after
the Nairobi conference: This [economic] distress exists in a climate of mounting violence and
militarism... violence follows an ideological continuum, starting from the domestic sphere
where it is tolerated, if not positively accepted. It then moves to the public political arena
where it is glamorized and even celebrated.... Women and children are the prime victims of
this cult of aggression.14 Since the 1980s, when women activists formed networks to work
more effectively on local and global issues, transnational feminist networks have engaged in
dialogues and alliances with other organizations in order to make an impact on peace, security,
conflict resolution, and social justice.. The expansion of the population of educated, employed,
mobile, and politically-aware women has led to increased activism by women in the areas of
peace, conflict resolution, and human rights. Around the world, women have been insisting
that their voices be heard, on the streets, in civil society organizations, and in the meeting halls
of the multilateral organizations. Demographic changes and the rise of a "critical mass" of
politically engaged women are reflected in the formation of many women's groups that are
highly critical of existing political structures; that question masculinist values and behaviors in
domestic politics, international relations, and conflict; and that seek to make strategic
interventions, formulating solutions that are informed by feminine values. An important
proposal is the institutionalization of peace education.
Links
Generic
L – Silence on Gender
Issues devoid of gender are a clear indicator of hegemonic masculinity; this has
created a situation where masculine is the norm.
Kronsell 06, Annica Kronsell: Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Lund,
edited by Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at
Vanderbilt University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Peace and
Development Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the
Department of Political Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Feminist
Methodologies of International Relations, 2006, Cambridge University p. 109
I became interested in what Hearn and Parker (2001: xii) call “the silent unspoken, not necessarily easily observable, but
fundamentally material reality" of institutions. Silence
on gender is a determining characteristic of
institutions of hegemonic masculinity and this is a key point. It indicates a normality and simply
"how things are." men are the standards of normality, equated with what it is to be human,
while this is not spelled out (Connell 1995: 212). Hegemonic masculinity "naturalizes the everyday practices
of gendered identities" (Peterson and True 1998: 21). This has led to the rather perplexing situation in
which "men are persons and there is no gender but the feminine” (Butler 1990: 19). Hence,
masculinity is not a gender; it is the norm. It should be noted that in the Swedish context, this masculinity norm
derives from a standard associated with white, heterosexual, male bodies. What I focus on is the normality, reproduced
within organizations and how that can be approached methodologically. The goal is to
problematize masculinities and the hegemony of men (cf. Zalgwski 1998a: 1). This is a risky enterprise
because masculine norms, when hegemonic, are never really a topic of discussion. They remain hidden silenced — yet continue to be affirmed in the daily practice of the institutions. Kathy Ferguson (1993: 8), for
one, suggests we challenge that which is widely acceptable, unified, and natural, and instead perceive it as being in need of
explanation. Breaking
the silence is to question what seems self-explanatory and turn it into a
research puzzle, in a sense, by making the familiar strange. It means giving the self-explanatory a history and a
context. Cynthia Enloe (2004; 1993) encourages feminists to use curiosity to ask challenging questions about
what appear as normal, everyday banalities in order to try to understand and make visible, for
example, as she does, the gender of` international relations (IR) both as theory and as practice. The first step is
to question even the most banal or taken-as—given of everyday practices of world politics. In
her study on women’s collective political organizing in Sweden, Maud Eduards (2002: 157) writes that “the most forbidden
act" in terms of gender relations is to name men as a political category, which transfers men
from a universal nothing to a specific something. If this is so, how can we actually study such silences? What are
the methods by which we can transcend this silence on gender?
L – The State
The state uses the public and private spheres as promotions for masculine IR
Peterson 04 [V. Spike: associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the
University of Arizona (Feminist Theories Within, Invisible To, and Beyond IR, Winter/Spring
2004) http://www.watsoninstitute.org/bjwa/archive/10.2/Feminist%20Theory/Peterson.pdf]
Given the assumption (since Aristotle) that public and private are internal to states, and the
assumption that IR is about relations among, not within, states, what relevance does the
dichotomy have to IR? On the one hand, as a foundational dichotomy in Western
thought, public and private shape our discourse generally, and IR is no exception. And insofar
as states are central to the discourse of IR, reference to them incorporates, implicitly and
explicitly, constructions of public and private. On the other hand, I make two related points
regarding the dichotomy as ideological. First, one powerful effect of foundational dichotomies is
that they are typically deployed as abstractions (disembedded from context) even as they carry
ideological force by valorizing one term at the expense of the other. Second, feminists argue
that the dichotomy of public and private is historically and conceptually gendered; it privileges
the public sphere as masculine. Abstract references to public and private then serve to
privilege and legitimize that which is associated with the masculine over that which is
associated with the feminine, and this has material effects. With these brief points in mind, I
offer a reading of two variants of public and private in relation to conventional IR
discourse. In both variants, the state/government constitutes the public and is associated with
masculine characteristics of politics, reason, order, and autonomy. The first variant takes the
territorial state as given and looks inward. This version resembles Aristotle’s dichotomy, with
the state/politics as the public distinguished from private sphere activities and relationships,
cast as domestic.
Nations incorporate, control, and have been constructed upon sexuality and
sexism.
Mayer 00 [Tamar Mayer: college prof. at Middlebury College, Gender Ironies of Nationalism,
“1. Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage,” ed by Mayer, pg ½]
The title of this book, Gender Ironies of Nationalism, is meant to convey the idea that the links
between “gender” and “nation” tell us about some of the more profound ironies of modern
social life. Despite its rhetoric of equality for all who partake in the “national project”, nation
remains, like other feminized entities - emphatically, historically and globally - the property of
men. At the same time, if it is gendered, nation remains - quite like gender and sexuality - a
construction that speaks to the conflicted urges of human community. For both “nation” and
“gender” help construct a fiction of “innateness” in which the name of bonds whose fragile,
endangered status is evidenced in the fierceness with which they are defended - and in the
fierceness with which the role of the imagination in the construction of transcendent categories
and the urge to reify those categories are both, at once, revealed and denied. The subtitle
Sexing the Nation emphasizes, further, that when sexed bodies compromise the nation we can
no longer think of the nation as sexless. Rather, by exploring the gender ironies of nationalism
we expose the fact that sexuality plays a key role in nation-building and in sustaining national
identity. The chapters in this volume demonstrate the many complex intimacies between
gender and nation and sexuality. They show, in particular, that control over access to the
benefits of belonging to the nation is virtually always gendered; that through control over
reproduction, sexuality and the means of representation the authority to define the nation
lies mainly with men. Finally, these chapters emphatically establish the relationship between
gender boundaries and the nation: for they demonstrate that while it is men who claim to
prerogatives of nation and nation-building it is for the most part women who actually tend to
accept the obligation of nation and nation-building.
L – Policymaking
Policymaking ignores gender
Marshall 1997 [Catherine, professor at the University of North Carolina, Feminist Critical Policy
Analysis: A perspective from post-secondary education, pg. ix-x]
Policy researchers and analysts have gained and retained legitimacy by focusing on the
problems and methods identified by powerful people. Those with a different focus are
silenced, declared irrelevant, postponed, coopted, put on the back burner, assigned responsibilities
with no training, budget, personnel or time, or otherwise ignored. Policies, -- authoritative agreements among
powerful people about how things should be – have been made without a feminist critical
glance. These two volumes focus on those areas of silence, on the policy issues at the fringe and on the kinds of policy analysis
methods, findings and recommendations that will disrupt but will also open possibilities. The two volumes identify theories and tools
for dismantling and replacing the politics, theories and modes of policy analysis that built ‘the master’s house’. The
individual
chapters illustrate how and why to expand policy questions and policy analysis methods to
incorporate critical and feminist lenses, demonstrating the promise of politics, analysis and
policymaking that thoughtfully and thoroughly works to uncover any source of oppression,
domination or marginalization and to create policies to meet the lived realities, needs, aspirations and values of women
and girls and others kept on the margin. The volumes name and develop a new field: Feminist critical Policy Analysis. The promise of
this field lies in its incorporation of perspective that ‘write against the grain’:
the feminist, critical stance, with policy
analysis that includes methods for focusing on the cultural values bases of policies;
deconstruction of policy documents; analysis of a policy intention and its potential effects,
such as affirmative Action and Title IX; studies of the micropolitical, for example, the dynamics of a school board task
force for sexual harassment, a tenure system’s effect on women academics, or the role of girls’ access to computers in the
implementation of computer policies; and analyses of policies, programs and political stances that do focus on neglected needs in
schooling. Policymakers
and analysts need to pause in order to recognize how issues of gender,
the needs of particular groups like the urban poor, women and non-dominant nationalities are
left out of education policy analyses. In order to connect effectively, women need to take a hard look
at the structures and arenas of policy. By presenting literatures, methods and examples, these
books name the field: feminist critical policy analysis leap at the challenge.
L – Courts
Patriarchy runs deeper than legal reforms—the 1AC focus on legal practices
serves to perpetuate the overarching system
Tickner 92 [Ann, Professor @ the School of International Relations USC, B.A. in History, U
London, M.A. in IR, Yale, PhD in pol science, “GENDER IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS—
FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ON ACHIEVING GLOBAL SECURITY”, pg. 12]
Most contemporary feminist perspectives define themselves in terms of reacting to traditional
liberal feminism that, since its classic formulation in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and John
Stuart Mill, has sought to draw attention to and eliminate the legal restraints barring women's
access to full participation in the public world. Most contemporary feminist scholars, other than
liberals, claim that the sources of discrimination against women run much deeper than legal
restraints: they are enmeshed in the economic, cultural, and social structures of society and
thus do not end when legal restraints are removed. Almost all feminist perspectives have been
motivated by the common goal of attempting to describe and explain the sources of gender
inequality, and hence women's oppression, and to seek strategies to end them. Feminists
claim that women are oppressed in a multiplicity of ways that depend on culture, class, and
race as well as on gender. Rosemary Tong suggests that we can categorize various
contemporary feminist theories according to the ways in which they view the causes of
women's oppression. While Marxist feminists believe that capitalism is the source of women's
oppression, radical feminists claim that women are oppressed by the system of patriarchy that
has existed under almost all modes of production. Patriarchy is institutionalized through legal
and economic, as well as social and cultural institutions. Some radical feminists argue that the
low value assigned to the feminine characteristics described above also contributes to
women's oppression. Feminists in the psychoanalytic tradition look for the source of women's
oppression deep in the psyche, in gender relationships into which we are socialized from birth.
L – Instrumental Rationality
Instrumental rationality is created through the competitive order of Western
men.
Tickner 05 [J. Ann, professor at the School of International Relations, University of Southern
California, “Gendering a Discipline: Some Feminist Methodological Contributions to
International Relations,” Signs, Vol. 30, No. 4, New Feminist Approaches to Social Science
Methodologies, pp. 2173-2188]
Feminist scholarship entered IR at the end of the 1980s at about the same time as the third debate.9 Most IR feminists have rejected
positivist methodologies in the sense I have defined them, preferring hermeneutic, historically contingent, sociological, and/or
ethnographically based methodologies to those influenced by the natural sciences and economics. Like feminists in other disciplines,
IR feminists have claimed that instrumental rationality, based on rational choice theory, is a
model extrapolated from the highly individualistic competitive behavior of Western men in
the marketplace, which IR theorists have generalized to the behavior of states. Rather than
uncritically assume the state as a given unit of analysis, IR feminists have investigated the constitutive features
and identities of “gendered states” and their implications for women’s and men’s lives (Peterson
1992). Feminists have asked whether it makes a difference that most foreign policy leaders in the world are men and why women
remain so fundamentally disempowered in matters of foreign and military policy. They have questioned why
states’ foreign
policies are so often legitimated in terms of typically hegemonic masculine characteristics and
why wars have been fought mostly by men. These constitutive questions have rarely been asked in IR; they are
questions that probably could not be asked within the epistemological and methodological boundaries of positivist social science.
L – Statistics / Data
Quantitative data and statistics work for the system, muting anything that is
not wanted.
Tickner 05 [J. Ann, professor at the School of International Relations, University of Southern
California, “What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations
Methodological Questions” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 1-21]
These two cases, as with most feminist IR research, have avoided quantitative methods. In fact, many feminist researchers
across the disciplines have manifested an open hostility to statistics and quantitative methods
deeming them part of patriarchal culture’s monolithic of “hard facts” (Reinharz, 1992:87). It is certainly
true that, as my case studies have demonstrated, fitting women and other marginalized people into
methodologically conventional quantitative frameworks has been problematic. Many of the
experiences of women’s lives have not yet been documented or analyzed either within social science disciplines or by states . The
choices that states make about which data to collect is a political act. Traditional ways in which data are
collected and analyzed do not lend themselves to answering many of the questions that feminists raise. The data that are
available to scholars and, more importantly the data that are not, determine which research
questions get asked and how they are answered. Marilyn Waring describes how national accounting systems
have been shaped and reshaped to help states frame their national security policies – specifically to understand how to pay for
wars.32 In
national accounting systems no value is attached to the environment, to unpaid work,
to the reproduction of human life, or to its maintenance or care, tasks generally undertaken by
women (Waring, 1988:3-4). Political decisions are made on the basis of data that policy elites
choose to collect (Waring, 1988:302). Waring goes on to assert that, under the guise of value- free science,
the economics of accounting has constructed a reality which believes that “value” results only
when (predominantly) men interact with the marketplace (Waring, 1988:17-18).Maria Mies also argues that
quantitative research methods are instruments for structuring reality in certain ways; she claims that she is not against every form of
statistics but rather its claim to have a monopoly on accurately describing the world. Statistical
procedures serve to
legitimize and universalize certain power relations because they give a “stamp of truth” to the
definitions upon which they are based (Mies, 1991:67). For example, the term “male head of household” came out of
a definition of a traditional western middle-class patriarchal family but does not correspond with present reality given that a majority
of women either work in the waged sector to supplement family income or are themselves heads of households. However, it is a
term that has been used, either explicitly or implicitly, in national accounting procedures and by international aid agencies and thus
has had significant consequences for women’s classification as workers, receivers of social benefits, and refugees. Women’s work,
often unpaid, as farmers, workers in family bus inesses, and caregivers is frequently overlooked in the compilation of labor statistics.
Crime statistics underreport women’s victimization in the private sphere, where most violent crimes go unreported.
Feminist
rejection of statistical analysis results both from a realization that the questions they ask can
rarely be answered by using standard classifications of available data and from an
understanding that such data may actually conceal the relationships they deem important. These
concerns, along with the methodological predispositions that I discussed in the first part of this paper, raise important issues concerning statistical measures of gender
(in)equality, measures that are important for the research question asked by Keohane as to whether states with highly unequal gendered hierarchies would behave differently
internationally from those with less unequal domestic social structures. Since Keohane raised this question in 1998 there have been attempts to answer it using quantitative
methods. For example, Mary Caprioli and Mark Boyer have used quantitative social science data and statistical methods – the International Crises Behavior data set and
multinomial logistic regression – to attempt to answer the question as to whether there is a relationship between domestic gender equality and states’ use of violence
internationally. Gender equality is measured in terms of percentage of women in parliament and number of years that women had the right to vote at the time of the beginning
of the conflict. While they admit that there have not been enough female leaders to establish any correlation between women’s leadership roles and states’ lessened use of
violence, their results do show that, according to their measures of gender equality
, the severity of violence used by states in
international crises decreases as domestic gender equality increases.
L – Realism
Realist assumptions and the security paradigm can’t solve structural problems
and ignore constant structural violence.
Pandey 06 [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, pg. 17-18]
Despite the fact that many significant critiques have made their presence felt, the discipline of
IR continues to be dominated by the sub-field of military security. The chief reason for the
same is the preponderance of the Realist paradigm which needs to be situated within the
circumstances of the historical legacy and birth of IR, the Cold War, the emergence of a single
hegemon post-Cold War, the renewed threat of terrorism, etc. Thus, concepts of balance of
power, deterrence, sovereignty, etc. have come to occupy the central and vast majority of
space in the subject matter of the discipline. Both theory and practice have served to reinforce
each other and this partnership has served to marginalize all other issues which are regarded as
“normative” concerns to the margins of the IR. Thus, issues such as Third World debt and
poverty are relegated to the realm of “low politics” and hence put on the backburner, while
matters pertaining to state security, wars, weaponisation and sovereignty are studied as an
integral part of the “high politics” which deserve salience. However, the more recent
innovation of human security studies is relevant to the Third World by sheer dint of its subject
matter which explores human vulnerability across the globe that could be the result of natural
or man-made disasters. Simon Dalby states that traditionally there have been two elements to
human security — freedom from fear and freedom from want but over the years, the former
element has overshadowed the latter (2002: 7). Further, he quotes the UNDP Human
Development Report (1994) to define human security. Thus, issues of poverty, disease, hunger,
famines, financial crises feature prominently here under the overarching topics of freedom
from want and hunger (Thomas and Wilkins 2004). In the coming century, the six great threats
to human security are unchecked rise in population, disparities in economic opportunities,
excessive international migration, environmental degradation, drug trafficking and
international terrorism (Dalby 2002: 8). It becomes clear that these threats are the result of
actions of millions of people rather than deliberate actions of specific states. Therefore, the
concept of security must change from the realist, statist and militarist preoccupations to
include human welfare. Despite the fact that the approach is holistic in its understanding of
world affairs and emancipatory in terms of its agenda, its drawback lies in that it largely
espouses a liberal humanitarian framework rather than a radical departure from existing
structural constraints
L – Hegemony
The advantage claims of the affirmative are part of a hyper-masculine
conception of international relations as a collection of threats which can only
be emasculated by extending our political and military domination. Their
demand for hegemony over the world logically extends to “the elimination of
all that is foreign”
Steans 98 [Jill: Senior Lecturer in International Relations Theory, Director of the Graduate
School for the University of Birmingham, Gender and International Relations, An Introduction,
page 108-109]
Critical approaches to International Relations criticize the state centrism of realism, not only because it is inherently reductionist, but
also because it presents a view of the state as a concrete entity with interests and agency. Not only does the state act, but the state
acts in the national interest. Those who adopt critical approaches view the state in dynamic rather than static terms, 15 as a
‘process’ rather than a ‘thing’. The ‘state’ does not exist in any concrete sense; rather it is ‘made’. The
state is made by the
processes and practices involved in constructing boundaries and identities, differentiating
between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. Andrew Linklater has recently argued that critical approaches to the study of
International Relations centre around understanding the processes of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’, which have in a sense always been
the central concerns of the discipline. However, as Linklater contends, critical theorists understand that these processes have also
worked to ‘include’ and ‘exclude’ people on the basis of race, class and gender. In
the ‘making’ of the state the
construction of the hostile ‘other’ which is threatening and dangerous is central to the making
of identities and the securing of boundaries. Indeed, David Campbell argues that the legitimation of
state power demands the construction of danger ‘outside’. The state requires this ‘discourse
of danger’ to secure its identity and for the legitimation of state power. The consequence of this is that
threats to security in realist and neo-realist thinking are all seen to be in the external realm and
citizenship becomes synonymous with loyalty to the nation-state and the elimination of all that is
foreign. Jean Elshtain has argued that the problems of war and the difficulties of achieving security in the so-called ‘anarchy’ of
the international realm, should not be seen as problems which are not rooted in the compulsion of interstate relations as such.
Rather, they arise from ‘the ordering of modern, technological society’ in which political elites have sought to control the masses by
the implementation of ‘the mechanism of the perfect army’. Elshtain argues that to see war as a continuation of politics by other
means, is to see a continuation of the ‘military model’ as a means of preventing civil disorder. In critiquing dominant conceptions of
security in International Relations, feminists have, to some extent, echoed the arguments of non-feminist critical thinkers, but have
been concerned to show what is lost from our understanding of security when gender is omitted. As was noted in chapter 4,
feminist political theorists have demonstrated that in much Western political thought the
conception of politics and the public realm is a ‘barracks community’, a realm defined in opposition
to the disorderly forces which threaten its existence.22 This same conception of politics is
constructed out of masculine hostility towards the female ‘Other’. One sees in the
development of this political discourse a deeply gendered subtext in which the citizen role is
in all cases identified with the male.23 Hartsock believes that this sets a hostile and combative dualism at the heart
of the community men construct and by which they come to understand their lives.24
L – Protection
State promises of protection against violence and rights violations are a
protection racket. They simulate roles of a masculine protector and a feminine
protectee all while strengthening the state—the source of the threat--masking
the structural violence that state authority is based upon.
Peterson 92 (V. Spike: prof of political science at the U of Arizona, Gendered States, ed:
Peterson, p. 49-52)
We can employ the lens of “protection” -here understood simply as the exchange of obedience/subordination for
(promises of) security-to explore how state systems (re)configure the meaning of and possibilities
for system-wide security. The focus of our lens is sharpened by examining ‘protection rackets,’ structural dependency, and
protector-protected identities. More specifically, I submit that rethinking ‘protection’ and its constructions of
security and identity, is a crucial component of efforts to address world security. I begin with
various forms of protection states promise: protecting citizens from each other, protecting
rights to privacy, protecting property rights, and protecting citizens from external threats.
Because security assumes so many guises, most people--regardless of their hierarchically differentiated positions within systems
experience some sense of participating in one or a number of these forms of “having’ security: for example, through identification
with a “secure” class, gender, role, age group, occupation, ethnic group, nation, etc. All people (at the least, as dependent children)
have experienced the need for protection, and seeking some form(s) of security, however defined, appears to be a ubiquitous
construction of human needs. As a justification for state power, therefore, “protection”--understood as providing forms of security-seems quite compelling. Yet this is to gloss over the ambiguities of “protection”: “With
one tone. ‘protection’ calls up
images of the shelter against danger provided by a powerful friend, a large insurance policy, or a sturdy
roof. With the other, it evokes the racket in which a local strong man forces merchants to pay
tribute in order to avoid damage-damage the strong man himself threatens to deliver. The
difference, to be sure, is a matter of degree. Worse, it is not simply a matter of degree (suggesting linear, single variable
comparisons) but a matter of trade-offs (suggesting interactive, multiple dimensions, always in process). The
interaction of
systems of in/security (patriarchy, instrumentalism, state making, industrial capitalism) renders complexities
and contradictions such that apparent gains can mask actual costs. The degree of gain or loss depends on
the specifics of context, on factors such as what time frame we adopt, how we perceive the gain or threat and our position in
relation to it, and our access to resources for dealing with or reconfiguring the situation. That is, the evaluation of actual gains and
trade-offs cannot be done in the abstract but requires contextualizing attention to interacting practices, institutions, and systems.
What do we know about large-scale protection systems? Defining a racketeer as “someone who creates a threat and then charges
for its reduction,” Tilly pursues the analogy of state making and war making as “quintessential protection rackets’: To the extent that
the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the
government has organized a protection racket. Since
governments themselves commonly simulate,
stimulate, or even fabricate threats of external war and since the repressive and extractive
activities of governments often constitute the largest current threats to the livelihoods of
their own citizens, many governments operate in essentially the same way as racketeers. As
Tilly notes, this is not to argue that “government authority rests only’ ... on the threat of violence. Nor does it entail the assumption
that a government’s only service is protection.”°’ Rather, the argument is that effective state making
depends upon
militarism, extraction, capital accumulation, and ideological legitimation. In the absence of “escape
routes” or sufficient power to resist centralizing forces, options for seeking security are severely limited; lacking “secure
alternatives, one is “forced” to participate in state forms of protection. Similarly, feminists have
explored the dynamics of marriage as a protection racket: systemic male violence against women and our position in the labor
market “force” us into marriage as protection from these systemic threats to our security. The gender politics of marriage and the
family cannot be understood without recognizing women’s vulnerability: women select marriage as a form of protection in large part
because their choices within systems reproducing structural violence are severely limited. Like State protection rackets, this is not to
argue that negative constructions of “protection” exhaust the meaning of marriage; protection
rackets do permit (but
do not in fact guarantee) some forms of security (economic support. Sex/affective pleasures, privacy),
especially those denied to nonparticipants. The point is, of course, that as protection rackets,
states and marriage are implicated in the reproduction of hierarchies and in the structural
violence against which they claim to offer protection. It is illuminating to review how the systemic costs and
insecurities of protection rackets are so effectively mystified. First, individual participants making “rational” choices to “accept”
protection, simultaneously act “irrationally” by reproducing systemic dependency. Benefits
to individual units appear
secured but at the expense of either system-based equity and justice or long-term system
sustainability. For example, in the case of states the appearance of protection is paid for in the
perpetuation of structural violence and in the security dilemma posed by the state system,
global ecology, and capitalist economics.
L – Body Counts
The rhetoric of the affirmative only fuels the fire, trying to convey the lose
associated with war in mere numbers. Only through using feminist geopolitics
can we speak out for the silenced other, the “necessary casualties”.
Hyndman 07 Associate Professor, Department of Social Science, Simon Fraser University
Jennifer, "Feminist Geopolitics Revisited: Body Counts in Iraq," February,
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=119&sid=d02929fe-0ccf423f-bcaa-c336eca5f5a3%40sessionmgr114]
The Two Wars: From Afghanistan to Iraq A number is important not only to quantify the cost of
war, but as a reminder of those whose dreams will never be realized in a free and democratic
Iraq. —(Ruzicka 2005) The dead of Iraq—as they have from the beginning of our illegal
invasion—were simply written out of the script. Officially they do not exist. —(Fisk 2005) The
‘‘fatality metrics’’ of war, the body counts of soldiers and civilians killed in violent conflict,
represent a geopolitics of war in themselves. The quotations above capture, in the first case,
the efforts of an American activist who tried to insert the body count into the geopolitical script
of a ‘‘free and democratic Iraq,’’ and in the second, the observations of a British journalist
critical of the invasion of Iraq, lamenting the invisible, mounting deaths of Iraqis that peaked in
July 2005. The deaths of militarized soldiers are officially counted, described, and remembered
by the armies that send them in to fight and the families they leave behind; the deaths of
civilians are not. Casualties might be thought of as masculinized (soldier) and feminized
(civilian) sides of the body count ledger amassed by both official and unofficial sources.
Although counting is an important device for remembering, it also flawed in the way it
transforms unnamed dead people into abstract figures that obfuscate the political meanings
of the violence and its social and political consequences. Counting bodies does not sufficiently
account for the remarkable destruction of lives and livelihoods occurring in Iraq. No metric or
measure of trauma and violence should dominate the meanings of suffering and loss. Global
media do provide us with overwhelming information about the scope and number of
atrocities occurring across the world, making their meaning and scope difficult to grasp.
‘‘There is too much to see, and there appears to be too much to do anything about. Thus, our
epoch’s dominating sense that complex problems can be neither understood nor fixed works
with the massive globalization of images of suffering to produce moral fatigue, exhaustion or
empathy, and political despair’’ (Kleinman and Kleinman 1997, 9). Nonetheless, what we see or
read is partial in two senses: it is a selective and always incomplete representation of the
crisis at hand, and it has been fashioned in particular ways that are at once institutionalized
and convey dominant kinds of meaning (Shapiro 1997). ‘‘Vision is always a question of the
power to see—and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices,’’ so ‘‘an optics is
a politics of position’’ (Haraway 1991, 192, 193). These partial representations shape our
responses, or not, to the geopolitics of war and the suffering at hand. ‘‘Much of routinized
misery is invisible; much that is made visible is not ordinary or routine’’ (Kleinman, Das, and
Lock 1997, xiii). How violent conflict and death is represented in the context of war is at least
as important as how much destruction and death wreaks havoc on a society. The more difficult
question is how to produce responsible relational representations of war that convey
meanings of loss, pain, and destruction without further fuelling conflict. How does one
represent the futility and tragedy of civilian death without promoting vengeance? More
important, which impressions and understandings 38 Volume 59, Number 1, February 2007 of
war actually shape public opinion and government actions, so that struggles to end such
violence may be successful? In revisiting feminist geopolitics in relation to body counts, I argue
for analyses that contextualize the effects of violence by connecting the lives and deaths of
victims counted during war to those of the audience that consumes that information.
Accountability, I contend now as then, is predicated on embodied epistemologies and
visibility, but fatality metrics fail to embody the casualties of war. Feminist geopolitics is about
putting together the quiet, even silenced, narratives of violence and loss that do the work of
taking apart dominant geopolitical scripts of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ Although the deconstruction of
such scripts is vital, feminist geopolitics aims to recover stories and voices that potentially
recast the terms of war on new ground.
Topic
L – War / Peace
Themes of conflict and security are tools to subordinate women and promote
the international patriarchal order
Byron and Thorburn 98 Sr. Lecturer and Head & Lecturer, Department of Government,
University of the West Indies [Jessica and Diana, “Gender and International Relations: A Global
Perspective and Issues for the Caribbean”, 59 Feminist Review 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 international
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 off 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 (1995) 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 privileges (Zalewski, 1995). 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 affirmative’s notion of “post-conflict peace” is gendered – women still have
to deal with violence and oppression after the male-centered IR claims “peace”.
Chinkin 2003 [Christine, professor of international law at the London School of Economics
and Political Science, 18 Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 867, lexis.]
The very concepts of post-conflict, reconstruction, and rehabilitation may be problematic. Just
as women experience war differently so too are their experiences of post-conflict gendered.
There can be no assumption that the violence stops for women with a formal ceasefire. Rather
the forms and location of gendered violence change. Their relations with war-traumatized
children, family members, and former fighters all place gendered demands upon them.
Demographic changes flow from the conflict. The disproportionate number of women impacts
upon issues such as access to land, housing and social benefits, and return after internal or
international displacement. Priority in social and health services may be proposed for those
(primarily males) who fought in the conflict, contributing to hardship and poverty for those
with social responsibility for the care of others. Focus upon addressing the ethnic or religious
difference that fuelled the conflict can obscure continued sex-based discrimination. In turn,
the intersections of ethnic or religious discrimination with sex should be identified and
considered. Women's experiences throughout the conflict will have been diverse and there
can be no assumption that all women will share the same ideologies or priorities. For example,
for some there may be very specific health care needs, such as treatment for sexually
transmitted disease and other consequences of rape; for others, finding information about
missing relatives, sons and husbands who have disappeared may be their foremost concern; for
others, this may be attempting to restore normality for their children; for all, economic survival
will be essential. Particular categories of women may have specific needs. For example, former
combatants may face difficulties in reintegration, especially where preferential measures are
directed towards male combatants. Not only is "post-conflict" n24 a misnomer for women, so
too are the notions of reconstruction and rehabilitation. Both concepts assume an element of
going back, restoring the status quo. But this is not necessarily what women seek. n25 The
goal is not restored dependence and subordination but rather an enhanced social position
that accords full citizenship, social justice, and empowerment based upon respect for women's
human dignity and human rights standards that may never previously have existed.
Both war and peace seen through a patriarchal conceptual framework develop
into “isms of domination” that replicate structural violence
Warren and Cady 94 [Warren is the Chair of the Philosophy Department at Macalester
College and Cady is Professor of Philosophy at Hamline University, Karen and Duane, “Feminism
and Peace: Seeing Connections”, p. 7, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3810167.pdf]
Conceptually, a feminist perspective suggests that patriarchal conceptual frameworks and the
behavior they give rise to, are what sanction, maintain, and perpetuate "isms of domination"sexism, racism, classism, warism,4 naturism5 and the coercive power-over institutions and
practices necessary to maintain these "isms." If this is correct, then no account of peace is
adequate which does not reveal patriarchal conceptual frameworks: they underlie and sustain
war and conflict resolution strategies. (Examples of why we think this is correct are laced
throughout the remainder of the paper.) One glaring example of how the dominant cultural
outlook manifests this oppressive conceptual framework is seen in macho, polarized,
dichotomized attitudes toward war and peace. Pacifists are dismissed as naive, soft wimps;
warriors are realistic, hard heroes. War and peace are seen as opposites. In fact few individual
warists or pacifists live up to these exaggerated extremes. This suggests a reconceptualization
of values along a continuum which allows degrees of pacifism and degrees of justification for
war (Cady 1989). Feminist philosophers regard conceptual considerations to be at the core of
peace issues because many of the other women-peace connections can be explained
theoretically with an analysis of patriarchal conceptual frameworks in place. The evidence for
the existence of such conceptual connections comes from a wide variety of sources: empirical
data and history; art, literature, and religion; politics, ethics, and epistemology; language and
science. Although we cannot discuss all of these sources here, we do consider several. They are
evidence of woman-peace connections that, in turn, help to establish the nature and
significance of the conceptual connections.
L – Middle Eastern Instability
Middle Eastern instability predictions are founded on the desire to control all
that is “irrational” and feminine
Engelhardt 9 [Tom, Co-Founder of American Empire Project and Contributor to Foreign Policy
in Focus, 3/5, “The Imperial Unconscious”, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tomengelhardt/the-imperial-unconscious_b_172178.html]
Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s recent
testimony on the Afghan War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: U.S. goals in
Afghanistan must be 'modest, realistic,' and 'above all, there must be an Afghan face on this
war,' Gates said. 'The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help
them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other
foreign army that has been in Afghanistan. Now, in our world, a statement like this seems so
obvious, so reasonable as to be beyond comment. And yet, stop a moment and think about this
part of it: “There must be an Afghan face on this war.” U.S. military and civilian officials used
an equivalent phrase in 2005-2006 when things were going really, really wrong in Iraq. It was
then commonplace — and no less unremarked upon — for them to urgently suggest that an
“Iraqi face” be put on events there. Evidently back in vogue for a different war, the phrase is
revelatory — and oddly blunt. As an image, there’s really only one way to understand it (not
that anyone here stops to do so). After all, what does it mean to “put a face” on something that
assumedly already has a face? In this case, it has to mean putting an Afghan mask over what
we know to be the actual “face” of the Afghan War — ours — a foreign face that men like
Gates recognize, quite correctly, is not the one most Afghans want to see. It’s hardly surprising
that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of Washington’s everyday
arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics, power, and war. And yet, make no
mistake, this is Empire-speak, American-style. It’s the language — behind which lies a deeper
structure of argument and thought — that is essential to Washington’s vision of itself as a
planet-straddling goliath. Think of that “Afghan face” mask, in fact, as part of the flotsam and
jetsam that regularly bubbles up from the American imperial unconscious. Of course, words
create realities even though such language, in all its strangeness, essentially passes unnoticed
here. Largely uncommented upon, it helps normalize American practices in the world,
comfortably shielding us from certain global realities; but it also has the potential to blind us to
those realities, which, in perilous times, can be dangerous indeed. So let’s consider just a few
entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of American Empire-Speak.
L – Afghanistan
The affirmatives justification of the war as a saving of women only further
engenders masculine stereotypes. This rhetoric further ingrains the idea that
colonialist white men have the duty to save women from the “savages”
Klinker 09 teacher's assistant in the department of womens studies at washington state
university [Mary Jo, “Book Reviews Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism” Radical
Teacher, Winter 2009, page 59]
The book is most powerful when examining systemic oppression in U.S. society and its
connection to the larger geopolitical context of U.S. imperialism. Angela Davis argues that we must
“place state violence, war, prison violence, torture, [and] capital punishment on a spectrum of
violence” (25) in order to understand the complexity of U.S. militarism. Nellie Hester Bailey connects
the systemic inequality of gentrification and the feminization of poverty as unrecognized forms of war. She explains that
“gentrification is class warfare waged against poor and working-class people of color. This catastrophe is directly linked to U.S.
imperialist war, and is happening not only in Harlem but throughout the country” (236). While much of the text specifically analyzes
the brute force of militarism utilized to uphold U.S. hegemony, Breta Joubert-Ceci theorizes that neoliberalist policies of privatization
and deregulation are also a war front. She argues that the U.S. dominated institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
World Bank have proliferated capitalism to violently exploit Latin America’s resources and labor, as well as the global South. The
authors attempt to reclaim the importance of feminism to anti-war movements after the Bush
administration co-opted feminist rhetoric to excuse the imperialist endeavor in Afghanistan.
Jennifer Fluri argues that the Afghanistan war had nothing to do with confronting Islamic patriarchy.
In reality these efforts entail the imposition of U.S. governmental discourses on human rights,
proliferated through the systemic destruction of people in order to ensure military superiority
and impose a “free” market structure (Fluri 155). Similarly, Elizabeth Philipose states “ Muslims and Muslim states are
held as the example par excellence of misogyny in the Western imagination, an imagination
that provokes the colonialist narrative that white men, in their enlightened masculinity, have
the duty to save brown women from brown men” (113).
Gendered geopolitics assigns value to some lives
Hyndman 07 Associate Professor, Department of Social Science, Simon Fraser University
Jennifer, "Feminist Geopolitics Revisited: Body Counts in Iraq," February,
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=119&sid=d02929fe-0ccf423f-bcaa-c336eca5f5a3%40sessionmgr114]
In my earlier work on body counts during the ‘‘war on terror’’ in Afghanistan, I argued that the visibility, or lack thereof,
of civilian deaths contributes to a gendered geopolitics that values (masculinized) U.S. lives
over ( feminized) Afghan ones. I illustrated how, after 9/11, short biographies of hundreds of the people killed in the
World Trade Center and elsewhere appeared in The New York Times. The human face of these horrific acts of violence in the United
States was everywhere apparent. A long time passed, however, before the same paper began to publish photos of civilians who had
lost family members to the bombings in Afghanistan, and to cover controversial statistics about how many civilians had been killed
in that country by U.S. military planes equipped with smart and not-so-smart bombs. Silence
around the equally
preposterous deaths of a people already ravaged by war and starvation was, I argued, (geo)politically
problematic. Public silence about the death or suffering of innocents in war is a form of political
appropriation. The death ledgers, if one can call them that, were highly gendered lists of us and them,
named and not, Americans and Afghans, soldiers and civilians. The tragedies at both of ends
of this violence were very similar in terms of lives lost, but the patriotic values placed on them
and their geopolitical value were highly disparate.
L – Afghanistan / Iraq
The deaths of Iraqis and Afghans do not matter, they are simply fatality metrics.
Feminist geopolitics embodies political subjects to reframe war.
Hyndman 07 Associate Professor, Department of Social Science, Simon Fraser University
Jennifer, "Feminist Geopolitics Revisited: Body Counts in Iraq," February,
http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=119&sid=d02929fe-0ccf423f-bcaa-c336eca5f5a3%40sessionmgr114]
ConcludingWords on Concluding War In both Iraq and Afghanistan our deaths appear to matter much
more than their deaths.8 The stakes are representational and political. ‘‘The world’s most
powerful military today is led by a cabal of restless nationalists immersed in an antiintellectual culture of affect and aggressive militarism’’ (O ´ Tuathail 2003, 857).O ´ Tuathail outlines William
Connelly’s argument that human thought is not merely representational but also ‘‘enactive,’’ that it is
made possible by a level constituted through encounters and negotiations with the world: ‘‘The
affective tsunami unleashed by the terrorist attacks of 2001 is a broad and deep one that has set down a powerful somatic marker
for most Americans’’ (O ´ Tuathail 2003, 859). Another tsunami of dead U.S. soldiers appears to be enacting greater wariness of the
war in Iraq, a war Americans now believe has little to do with the attacks of 9/11. When our losses are mourned and broadcast, the
deaths are more fully registered and the violence of the war questioned. These named bodies in the context of Iraq are generally not
civilians but soldiers. Californian Maria Ruzicka (2005), in her last dispatch from Iraq, wrote that Recently, I obtained statistics on
civilian casualties from a high-ranking U.S. military officer. counts is the Iraqi Assistance Center in Baghdad and the General
Information Centers set up by the U.S. military across Iraq. Iraqis who have been harmed by Americans have the right to file claims
for compensation at these locations. . . . These statistics demonstrate that the U.S. military does track civilian casualties. Ruzicka was
a tireless activist who helped push the bill for the US$17.5 million compensation package through the U.S. Congress for Afghan and
Iraqi victims of the war (MacKinnon 2005). She and her driver were killed in April 2005, driving to Baghdad airport. Did her body
counts have an impact on the war itself? Certainly she paid a high price for her convictions, though she lived long enough to see
some compensation for the families of civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her
efforts to narrate the stories of
families as embodied political subjects, even victims, established the ‘‘moral proximity’’
O’Kane produced, and moved the United States to ‘‘do something.’’ Ruzicka’s efforts were an
expression of feminist geopolitics to the extent that they destabilized dominant geopolitical
discourse by peopling it and by mobilizing the United States that invaded Iraq in the name of
national security to provide some material security for the injured civilians and the families of
those killed in that very invasion. Like Margaret Hassan, who was both like us and like them, and Maggie O’Kane who
rendered ‘‘their’’ pain and suffering our own during another war, Maria Ruzicka attempted to invoke proximity
and familiarity. She did so by documenting the stories and losses of those affected by the war
in Iraq to lobby the U.S. government and inform the North American public. Critical race commentators such
as Stuart Hall remind us that ‘‘concrete political engagement does not translate into an antitheoretical stance,’’ but rather widens the notion of what constitutes theory. If you ask me what is
the object of my work, the object of the work is to always reproduce the concrete in thought—not to generate another good theory,
but to give a better-theorized account of concrete historical reality. This is not an anti-theoretical stance. I need theory in order to
do this. But the goal is to understand the situation you started out with better than before. —(Stuart Hall, quoted in Nagar 2002,
184) Part of this project to bridge feminist and political geography, then, is to challenge the concepts, tools, and theories of political
geography in ways that ‘‘democratize knowledge production through recognition of the importance of situated knowledge and
through critical engagement between scholarship and the world in which we live and work’’ (Staeheli and Kofman 2004, 5).
Feminist geopolitics challenges state centric dominant geopolitical narratives that reduce
dead bodies to fatality metrics by establishing moral proximity between those killed and
those watching, and grounding disembodied epistemologies in the suffering and survival of
players in the war, making them political subjects alongside states and armies. This article has
revisited the strategic feminist geopolitics and normative liberal political position invoked in
my earlier work on the war in Afghanistan in light of the war in Iraq. In the earlier piece, I discuss Michael Shapiro’s
(1997) distinction between strategic and ethnographic perspectives of mapping cultures of war. Strategic perspectives deepen
identity attachments and formal boundaries by treating them as real, whereas ethnographic approaches aim to unsettle such takenfor-granted attachments by questioning the boundary-making narratives through which they are shaped. In trying to invoke political
change according to the logic of its makers rather than critically engaging the terms of its struggle, I took a calculated risk that the
former would be politically more effective than the latter. From strategic to ethnographic, my position has shifted. This article
illustrates that
embodied epistemologies provide alternative ways to frame war. The question of
who is counted and who counts as subjects in this landscape of political violence points to a
feminist geopolitics that may be more successful at disrupting the dominant geopolitical script
of the war on terror in Iraq and elsewhere. Feminist geopolitics builds on the strengths of
critical geopolitics, and in so doing recasts political possibilities by identifying fissures in
dominant geopolitical scripts. But it goes further: it resuscitates the narratives of those
affected by violent conflict, and recasts the subject of geopolitics as the fate of people, not
simply as a struggle between states over oil and weapons of mass destruction. In very different ways
Margaret Hassan and Maria Ruzicka embodied hope and prospects for change in Iraq. They defied simplistic binaries of us and them,
here and there, but they also paid for such struggles with their lives. Their work destabilizes dominant geopolitical scripts and
generates more epistemologically embodied ways of seeing.’
L – Terrorism
The fight against terrorism is a fight against the uncivilized, irrational danger—
this justifies endless war and intervention to protect the masculine order
Wilcox 03 [Lauren, PhD in IR @ University of Minnesota, BA @ Macalester College, MA @
London School of Economics, “Security Masculinity: The Gender-Security Nexus”]
These statements give several clues as to the implications of ”barbaric‘ behavior. Terrorists are barbaric and
uncivilized, and opposed to democracy. Those who commit evil acts commit attacks against
civilization, therefore, being uncivilized is equivalent to being evil. Finally, terrorists fight without rules, they kill
innocents and women, and they are cowards, therefore they are barbaric and uncivilized.
Overall, the message is clearly that of a dichotomous world, in which there are only two choices;
civilization or barbarism, us or them.
In order to understand the significance of the use of the discourse of civilization versus barbarism in the war on terror, a brief history
of this discourse is helpful. Applying the label ”barbaric‘ to people from the Middle East, or any non-white peoples is hardly a new
historical development. In his book Orientalism˙ Edward Said critiques the discipline of Oriental Studies in the European and
American academies for reproducing stereotypes and using their privileged status to create knowledge about people in the Middle
East that served to justify and increase their control and domination over these people. 63 Said
describes the
relationship between West and the Middle East, as seen from the West, —to be one between a strong
and a weak partner,“ and adds that, —many terms were used to express the relations…The Oriental is irrational,
depraved (fallen), childlike, ”different‘; thus the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ”normal.‘ “64 This
relationship is gendered in that ”Orientals‘ are assigned traits associated with femininity and inferiority. This dichotomous
relationship is replicated in political discourses as well as in academic and literary circles.
The discourse of civilization/barbarism was used in order to justify colonialism of non-white
peoples throughout the world, and has a long history in US foreign history. A people labeled
”uncivilized‘ is considered to be unable to rule themselves, and is need of guidance from more
civilized people. The use of force against ”barbarians‘ is also justified.65 Furthermore, the rules of
humane and civilized warfare do not apply to wars against ”barbaric‘ peoples. Against this
background, the use of the discourse of barbarism can be seen as an attempt to foretell the coming war and to persuade people of
the necessity of using force against al-Qaeda and their hosts in Afghanistan. The additional measures of control, surveillance, and
detention of Middle Eastern and North African men in the process of securitizing immigration served to harass, demean and
contributing to the constructing of the hegemonic masculinity of
American men. The ”special‘ registration requirements for the National Security Entry-Exit System is evidence of the gendered
subordinate this ”inferior‘ masculinity,
inside/outside, us/them distinction in regards to national identity. This program, instituted as part of the securitization of
immigration, serves to support the construction and maintenance of the current articulation of
hegemonic masculinity,
which differentiates American men as superior to men in the Middle East. The special registration
requires that men and boys over the age of fifteen with non-immigrant visas from countries in the Middle East, Northern Africa,
countries with large Muslim populations such as Indonesia and Pakistan, and an outlier, North Korea, be
interviewed and have their whereabouts tracked by the INS.66 These persons will be finger printed and
photographed, with their fingerprints matched against fingerprints of known or suspected
terrorists and used by law enforcement. They are also required to submit personal contact information, and are
required to notify the Attorney General when the change addresses. These measures are in addition to the detention and
questioning of thousands of men of Arab or Muslim background after the September 11 that tacks, some allegedly detained without
people seeking asylum
are now being detained pending the processing of their
applications, where previously they have been released.68 By concentrating on men as the ”outsiders‘
Middle Eastern men specifically service not only as the ”other‘ that American identity is
contrasted again, but a feminized ”other‘ that American masculinity is defined against.
access to attorneys or proper food.67 The INS has also recently changed its policy on asylum, as
from thirty-three countries, mostly in the Middle East,
Impacts
! – Extinction
Patriarchy is not inevitable—failure to solve guarantees extinction
Clark 04 [Mary E., PhD and professor of biological studies @ Berkeley, "RHETORIC,
PATRIARCHY & WAR: EXPLAINING THE DANGERS OF "LEADERSHIP" IN MASS CULTURE",
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-4005307/Rhetoric-patriarchy-war-explainingthe.html]
I begin by questioning the notion that patriarchy is a "natural" or "inevitable" form of human
society. By "patriarchy" I do not mean a community or society where males hold political
positions as spokespersons for the whole and often are adjudicators of local disputes. This "male
function" is common in tribal and indigenous societies. But men's power over others is severely
limited and generally held only at the pleasure of the entire group, especially the elder women.
(4) Patriarchies, rather, are those much larger societies where not only is there gender
dominance; they also are highly class-structured, with a small, powerful elite controlling the
rest of society, A short history of these entities is necessary to understand today's dilemma.
Rigidly controlled patriarchies have evolved and disintegrated at many times and in many
places in the past few millennia of human existence-which, being the era of written history, is
the condition of humankind most familiar to us. But, as I have argued elsewhere (5) this was an
unknown political condition throughout earlier human existence, when small, egalitarian,
highly dialogic communities prevailed. Even today, small remnants of such societies still exist
in comers of the planet that escaped the socially destructive impact of Western colonization.
Modern Western "democracies" are, in fact, patriarchal in structure, evolving out of the old,
male-dominated aristocracies of late-Medieval Europe. Those historic class/caste hierarchies
were legitimized by embedded religious dogma and inherited royal authority. Together, church
and monarch held a monopoly of physical and economic power, creating politically stable, albeit
unjust, societies. During the gradual development of the religious Reformation, coupled with the
Enlightenment's concept of the "individual citizen," emerging egalitarian ideas threatened to
destabilize the social coherence of patriarchal regimes. At the same time, principalities and
dukedoms were fusing into kingdoms; kingdoms, in turn, were joining together as giant nation
states. The United Kingdom was formed of England, Wales and Scotland-each a fusion of local
earlier dukedoms. City States of Italy fused rather later. Bismarck created the "Second Reich"
out of diverse German-speaking princedoms in the 1870s. And, adding to this growth in the
sheer size of patriarchies there was a doubling of populations every couple of generations.
Nation-states emerged as "mass cultures," with literally millions of persons under the control
of a single, powerful government. The centralized physical power possessed by most of these
several industrializing European nations matched or exceeded that of ancient Rome. To achieve
coherence of such societies demanded a new legitimating force to create a broad base of
support among giant, diverse populations. The erosion of the belief that classes were a godgiven, "natural" state of affairs was hastened by the introduction of low-cost printing and rapidly
growing levels of literacy (both necessary to underpin the new Industrial Age). These politically
equalizing forces unleashed a host of social discontents that had to be controlled. The old
religious threats of damnation or excommunication were fast losing their force, and new legal
systems circumscribed the absolute powers of monarchs to control social behavior. This very
cacaphony of voices threatened the stability of the new giant states. The "solution," of course,
was to take control of the public dialogue, to define the legitimate "topics of conversation."
This is the primary role of political "leadership" in today's mass societies, and that leadership
uses two major tools to wield its influence: rhetoric and the mass media. I suggest, then, that
the high potential for internal instability in giant patriarchal states is a primary factor in
setting the stage for today's global insecurity and the extreme militaristic rhetoric that exists
both within and between nations. Before continuing this discussion of patriarchy's dangers, I
would note that, although in modern Western patriarchies the domination of women by men is
less evident as women have gained increasing political and economic status, women with such
status tend to assume the "shoulder pads" and "language" of men when it comes to political
and economic institutions. Women like Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, Golda Melt,
Israeli Prime Minister; Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, Reagan's Ambassador to the United Nations;
Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State; Margaret Thatcher, Britain's Prime Minister;
and Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's Security Advisor, come readily to mind. (Thatcher cites
the following terms the media applied to her: Iron Lady, Battling Maggie, and Attila the Hen. (6))
The glass ceiling in the corporate world has proved harder to crack, however, so fewer wellknown examples exist there of powerful females. (Katherine Graham, who became publisher of
the Washington Post after the death of her husband, was one of the few powerful women who
to her credit, did not adopt the patriarchal mode.) Hence, I regard the Western nations'
politico-economic world view as very much in accordance with that of historical patriarchies,
with perhaps one or two Scandinavian exceptions. I thus conclude that the language of
international politics today is "gendered" by the political insecurity experienced by leaders of
earlier patriarchies, and that the presence of women in such governments has little effect on
the framework of public dialogue. (I recall hearing Geraldine Ferraro, when running for VicePresident in 1984, assure an interviewer that she would not hesitate to push the "nuclear
button" if necessary.) Hence, it is not our X and Y chromosomes that are at issue here; it is the
gendered world view that underpins our institutions and frames our behaviors. As long as
those in power "think" in this patriarchal box, we will live in a globally-armed camp, where
war-leading even to the annihilation of our species-is a constant, real possibility.
! – War
Masculine approaches to foreign policy to lead narrow-minded solutions and
war.
Tickner 03 [J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, The Brown Journal of
World Affairs, 10(2), p. 54]
So to get back to your question, yes, I do think that the war in Iraq is a masculine approach. The
emphasis on a strong military response closes off other more conciliatory options. This is not
the same thing as saying that men always favor the use of force while women always favor more
peaceful responses. Women supported this war, too, although there was a significant gender
gap on the issue, at least until the war started. What I am saying that we are all socialized into
regarding masculine norms as the correct way to operate—particularly in matters of foreign
policy. This has the negative effect of shutting off other options. And the framing of the war on
terrorism as good versus evil reflects the kind of dichotomous thinking that feminists find
deeply problematic, as I have illustrated with my definition of gender. Feminists have written a
great deal about the dangers of either/or categorizations and the tolerance for ambiguity, both
of which could be useful here.
The hegemonic masculinity perpetuated by the aff justifies military
adventurism, turning the case.
Tickner 01 [J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, Gendering World Politics:
Issues and Approaches in the Post–Cold War Era, p. 49]
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.
preferred policy’s flawed assumptions, it does not account for the origins of the particular policy
whose flaws go unrecognized: In this case groupthink does not explain why administration
leaders were considering an invasion option in the first place. Implications of Ideological and
Non-rational Influences Theories address causality on a fundamental level only if they address
why the invasion policy was under consideration in the first place. While President Bush had
personal motives for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, personality traits should not necessarily be
considered causal. For example, although Bush’s religious beliefs and his lack of cognitive
complexity may be relevant factors, the connection with Iraq is imprecise. Such traits may have
facilitated approval of the invasion policy but were not responsible for its emergence and its
prominence. One may with more confidence view Bush’s personal animosity toward Iraq’s ruler
as another tipping factor that made the invasion policy more attractive. If U.S. society exhibits a
perennial need for an external enemy, in part due to widespread nationalist attitudes, then the
convergence of Christian evangelical and Zionist ideologies in the U.S. perhaps helps explain the
choice of Iraq, rather than a different target. At the societal level, and among political elites, a
sense of national chosenness and superiority, as well as racism, may make the U.S. more warprone in the Middle East, due to evangelicals’ beliefs about the Holy Land, and due to domestic
political incentives for championing Israel. Ideological beliefs may have rendered U.S. leaders
more susceptible to manipulation by those like Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, or the government of
Ariel Sharon in Israel, which may have fed the U.S. false intelligence reports about Iraqi
weapons in order to promote a U.S. invasion that served their own political agendas.
! – Serial Policy Failure
Failure to account for the ontological roots of modern politics ensures serial
policy failure – we will repeatedly reproduce the same problems that we seek
to solve
Dillon & Reid 2000 [Michael & Julian, Prof of Politics & Prof of International Relations,
“Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency,” Alternatives: Social
Transformation & Humane Governance 25.1]
As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault's initial account, poses the question of order not in
terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the
management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population
management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental
power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there
is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an operation of power. Here discursive
formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in
every society the production of discourse is at once
controlled, selected, organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose
role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its
ponderous, formidable materiality.[ 34] More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is
expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed
and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains.
Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings
of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers.
Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such
problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might
be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated,
bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there
is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter
with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a
market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors
fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization
of problems is constrained
by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the
sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions
that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological
assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely
at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled
constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What
they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial
policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all
policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them
from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.[ 35] Serial policy failure
is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome.
Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion
the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence
through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of
intervention into life,
global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that
it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not
a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems
simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of
power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of
wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which
life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking
and acting politically is displaced by the
institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the
local conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to
exhaust what "politics," locally as well as globally, is about.[ 36] It is here that the "emergence" characteristic of governance begins
to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to
objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The "subjects" of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as
well, since the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and
biomolecular as well as Foucauldian "biopower" ways.
! – Patriarchy Root Cause
War is the product of gendered understandings of life in which the masculine
dominates the feminine – it can be removed only when these understandings
change
Workman 96 [Thom, Poli Sci @ U of New Brunswick, YCISS Paper no. 31, p. 5, January 1996,
http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/OP31-Workman.pdf]
The gender critique of war provides a generalized account of wars and the way they are fought.
The gender critique tells us why we have wars at all. While it is suggestive with respect to the
frequency, character, and scope of war, it does not try to account for the timing and location of
specific wars. It tells us why war is viewed widely as an acceptable practice or way to resolve
human differences (although this acceptance invariably is accompanied with obligatory
protestations of reluctance). The gender critique of war, for example, cannot account for the
timing and location of the 1991 Gulf War, although it can provide an explanation of the warring
proclivities of modern Western states, especially the inconsistency between the peaceful
rhetoric of the US and its incessant warring practices. It can account for the spectre of war in
the aftermath of Vietnam, with the end of the Cold War, and with the election of George Bush.
It is less able to account for the appearance of war in the Middle East in January of 1991. The
opening intellectual orientation of the gender critique of war rests upon a constructivist view of
human understanding and practice, that is, a view that anchors practices, including war, within
humankind's self-made historico-cultural matrix. This view is contrasted starkly with those that
ground human practices psychologically or biologically or genetically. War is not viewed as a
natural practice as if delivered by the Gods; it arises out of human-created understandings
and ways-ofliving that have evolved over the millennia. More specifically, the assumption that
men (the nearly exclusive makers and doers of war) are biologically hard-wired for aggression
and violence is resisted, as is the related notion that women are naturally passive and nonviolent. The explanation for war will not be found in testosterone levels. It is not the essential
or bio-social male that makes war. War is the product of the gendered understandings of life—
understandings of the celebrated masculine and the subordinated feminine—that have been
fashioned over vast tracts of cultural time. And since war arises from human-created
understandings and practices it can be removed when these understandings change. War is
not insuperable. Indeed, the rooting of war in human created phenomena is recognized as a
response to the political incapacitation associated with biologically determinist arguments:
"Attempts of genetic determinists to show a biological basis for individual aggression and to link
this to social aggression, are not only unscientific, but they support the idea that wars of
conquest between nations are inevitable."8
Patriarchy is the root cause of war, which in turn recreates patriarchy
Workman 96 [Thom, Poli Sci @ U of New Brunswick, YCISS Paper no. 31, p. 7, January 1996,
http://www.yorku.ca/yciss/publications/OP31-Workman.pdf]
The practices of war emerge within gendered understandings that inflect all spheres of social
life. As we created "man" and "woman" we simultaneously created war. Contemporary
warfare, in complementary terms, emerges within the inner-most sanctums of gendered life.
Gender constructs are constitutive of war; they drive it and imbue it with meaning and sense.
War should not be understood as simply derivative of the masculine ethos, although it
numerous facets accord with the narratives and lore of masculinity. The faculty of war is our
understanding of man and women, of manliness and womanliness, and particularly of the
subordination of the feminine to the masculine. It is the twinning of the masculine and the
feminine that nourishes the war ethic. This can be illustrated by examining the infusion of the
language of war with heterosexual imagery typically of patriarchy, that is, with ideas of the
prowess-laden male sexual subject conquering the servile female sexual object. Both sex and
war are constituted through understandings of male domination and female subordination.
The language is bound to be mutually reinforcing and easily interchangeable. War is a
metaphor for sex and sex is a metaphor for war. A recent study of nicknames for the penis
revealed that men were much more inclined to metaphorize the penis with reference to mythic
or legendary characters (such as the Hulk, Cyclops, Genghis Khan, The Lone Ranger, and Mac
the Knife), to authority figures and symbols (such as Carnal King, hammer of the gods, your
Majesty, Rod of Lordship, and the persuader), to aggressive tools (such as screwdriver, drill,
jackhammer, chisel, hedgetrimmer, and fuzzbuster), to ravening beasts (such as beast of
burden, King Kong, The Dragon, python, cobra, and anaconda), and to weaponry (such as love
pistol, passion rifle, pink torpedo, meat spear, stealth bomber, destroyer, and purple helmeted
love warrior).11 The intuitive collocation of sexuality with domination, conquering,
destruction, and especially instruments of war is confirmed by this study. Both sex and war,
however, are manifestations of the gendered notions of power-over, submission, inequality,
injury, contamination, and destruction. Both practices are integral expressions of patriarchal
culture and proximate to its reproduction. It is hardly surprising that the language of sexuality
and war is seamless.
Alternatives
Alt – Gendered Lens
The alternative is to vote negative. In questioning the masculine conceptions of
the 1AC we are able to embrace a feminist ethic that challenges the inequalities
and violence of the status quo
Moghadam 01 [Valentine: feminist scholar and author, “Violence and Terrorism: Feminist
Observations on Islamist Movements, State, and the International System” Comparative Studies
of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 21.1-2, Project Muse]
Our world desperately needs new economic and political frameworks in order to end the
vicious cycle of violence and bring about people-oriented development, human security, and
socio-economic justice, including justice for women. Such frameworks are being proposed in
international circles, whether by some UN circles, the antiglobalization movement, or the global
feminist movement. Women's peace movements in particular constitute an important
countermovement to terrorism, and they should be encouraged and funded. Feminists and
women's groups have long been involved in peace work, and their analyses and activities have
contributed much to our understanding of the roots of conflict and the conditions for conflict
resolution, human security, and human development. There is now a prodigious feminist
scholarship that describes this activism while also critically analyzing international relations from
various disciplinary vantage points, including political science.° The activities of antimilitarist
groups such as the Women's international League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Women
Strike for Peace, and the Women of Greenham Common are legendary, and their legacy lies in
ongoing efforts to "feminize" peace, human rights, and development. At the third UN
conference on women, in Nairobi in 1985, women decided that not only equality and
development, but also peace and war were their affairs.° The Nairobi conference took place in
the midst of the crisis of Third World indebtedness and the implementation of austerity policies
recommended by the World Bank and the IME Feminists were quick to see the links between
economic distress, political instability, and violence against women. As Lucille Mair noted after
the Nairobi conference: This [economic] distress exists in a climate of mounting violence and
militarism... violence follows an ideological continuum, starting from the domestic sphere
where it is tolerated, if not positively accepted. It then moves to the public political arena
where it is glamorized and even celebrated.... Women and children are the prime victims of
this cult of aggression.14 Since the 1980s, when women activists formed networks to work
more effectively on local and global issues, transnational feminist networks have engaged in
dialogues and alliances with other organizations in order to make an impact on peace, security,
conflict resolution, and social justice.. The expansion of the population of educated, employed,
mobile, and politically-aware women has led to increased activism by women in the areas of
peace, conflict resolution, and human rights. Around the world, women have been insisting
that their voices be heard, on the streets, in civil society organizations, and in the meeting halls
of the multilateral organizations. Demographic changes and the rise of a "critical mass" of
politically engaged women are reflected in the formation of many women's groups that are
highly critical of existing political structures; that question masculinist values and behaviors in
domestic politics, international relations, and conflict; and that seek to make strategic
interventions, formulating solutions that are informed by feminine values. An important
proposal is the institutionalization of peace education.
Alt – Feminist Analysis
The method by which feminists formulate knowledge does not adhere to a
particular standard, rather it is flexible and ongoing- this framework for analysis
is critical to comprehend and change the gender and power hierarchies that
oppress people
Tickner 06 [Feminist Methodologies or International Relations, J. Ann Ticker: Professor, School
of IR at USC, edited by Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political
Science at Vanderbilt University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of
Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the
Department of Political Studies at the University of Aucfkland, New Zealand, 2006, Cambridge
University Press p. 21-22]
Feminists claim no single standard of method of correctness or “feminist way” to do research
(Reinharz 1992: 243); nor do they see it as desirable to construct one. Many describe their
research as a journey, or an archeological dig, that draws on different methods or tools
appropriate to the goals of the task at hand, or the questions asked, rather than on any prior
thodo1ogical commitment more typical of IR social science (Rcinharz 1992: 211; CharleS’4’°’
1994: 6; Jayaratfle and Stewart 1991: 102; Sylvester 2002). Feminist knowledge building is an
ongoing process tentative and emergent, feminists frequently describe knowledge-building as
emerging rough conversation with texts, research subjects, or data (Rcinharz 1992: 230)b Many
feminist scholars prefer to use the term “epistemological perspective” rather than
“methodology” to indicate the research goals and orientation of an ongoing projects the aim
of which is to challenge and rethink what is claimed to be “knowledge,” from the perspective
of women’s lives (Reinhart 1992: 241). Feminist scholars emphasize the challenge to and
estrangement from conventional knowledge-building caused by the tension of being inside and
outside one’s discipline at the same time. Given that feminist knowledge has emerged from a
deep skepticism about know1edge which claims to be universal and objective but which is, in
reality, knowledge based on men’s lives, such knowledge is constructed simultaneously out of
disciplinary frameworks and feminist criticisms of these disciplines.7 Its goal is nothing less
than to transform these disciplinary frameworks and the knowledge to which they contribute.
Feminist inquiry is a dialectical process - listening to women and understanding how the
subjective meanings they attach to their lived experiences are so often at variance with
meanings internalized from society at large (Nielsen 1990: 26). Much of feminist scholarship is
both transdisiplinary and avowedly political; it has explored and sought to understand the
unequal gender Hierarchies as well as other hierarchies of power, which exist in all societies,
and their effects on the subordination of women and other disempowered people with the
goal of changing them.8 I shall now elaborate on four methodological perspectives which guide
much of feminist research: a deep concern with which research questions get asked and why;
the goal of designing research that is useful to women (and also to men) and is both less biased
and more universal than conventional research; the centrality of questions of reflexivity and the
subjectivity of the researcher; and a commitment ot knowledge as emancipation.
The feminist methodology advances our understanding of IR and is objectively
better than other approaches
Kronsell 06, Annica Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Lund, edited by
Brooke A. Ackerly: Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt
University, Maria Stern: Lecturer and Researcher at the Department of Peace and Development
Research, Goteborg University, and Jacqui True: Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political
Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Feminist Methodologies of International
Relations, 2006, Cambridge University.
In this chapter I have suggested that feminist theorizing about methodology should include a
more worked-out account of what scholarly collectives should look like. This approach
provides the conceptual basis on which to argue that mainstream scholarship should, for
methodological reasons, attend to and take account of feminist, postcolonial, and other
situated standpoints. Taking account of feminist work in international relations will advance
our collective understanding of international relations, and will make mainstream work more
objective and less distorted. Theorizing what the structure of a scholarly feminist collective
should look like highlights how the organization and procedural norms of the discipline pose
obstacles to advancing our understanding of international Relations. Current feminist
epistemology in International Relations emphasizes the situatedness of individual researchers,
but the approach advanced here suggests that individual decisions are only part of the story;
our disciplinary structure cannot be neutral in terms of epistemology. Some feminist
epistemological approaches tend to emphasize the benefit of cultivating multiple perspectives,
moving away from stand- point epistemology’s original emphasis on the superiority of the
subju- gated standpoint. But this approach provides no political leverage for those who wish to
argue that mainstream scholars must attend to feminist work. The "live and let live" approach
poses little obligation on mainstream scholars, and does nothing to break down scholarly
segregation. In failing to emphasize that some approaches are better than others, it obscures
the weaknesses of mainstream approaches and permits main- stream scholars to dismiss
feminist work. (Of course, this is not the fault of these feminist epistemologies.) To the extent
that arguments make any difference, it is important to have grounds for demanding that
mainstream scholars attend to feminist work and take it seriously, as opposed to ignoring it. In
this chapter I develop the basis for saying that they must do so, not only because ignoring this
work is unfair or sexist, but also because doing so blocks them, and the broader discipline, from
a better, fuller understanding of politics. Attending to feminist perspectives (and the
perspectives of other marginalized groups) should force a transformation of dominant
paradigms and give us all a better under- standing of international relations. This is an
epistemological argument, then, grounded in feminism and pragmatism, for adopting a
methodology of inclusion; for ensuring that feminist voices are articulated and heard in
scholarly discussions of international relations.
Alt Solves
The feminist question must be an explicit part of any policy discussion – it’s the
only hope of preventing violence
Enloe 04 [Cynthia: Professor of Women’s Studies at Clark University, The Curious Feminist,
page 129-130]
Asking feminist questions openly, making them an explicit part of serious foreign policy
discussion, is likely to produce a much more clear-eyed understanding of what is driving any
given issue debate and what are the probable outcomes of one policy choice over another.
Precisely because the United States currently has such an impact on the internal political
workings of so many other countries, we need to start taking a hard look at American political
culture. If this globalizing culture continues to elevate a masculinized "toughness" to the
status of an enshrined good, military needs will continue to be assigned top political priority,
and it will be impossible for the United States to create a more imaginative, more
internationally useful foreign policy. Cultures are not immutable. Americans, in fact, are
forever lecturing other societies - Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico, France - on how
they should remake their cultures. U.S. citizens, however, have been loath to lift up the rock of
cultural convention to peer underneath at the masculinized presumptions and worries that
shape American foreign policies. What would be the, most immediate steps toward unraveling
the masculinized U.S. foreign policy knot? A first step would be for both congressional and
presidential policymakers to stop equating "security" with military superiority. A second step
would be to muster the political will for Congress to ratify the International Criminal Court
treaty, the land mines treaty, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. A third step would
be for Democrats and Republicans to halt their reckless game of "chicken" regarding both the
anti-missile defense system and increases in U.S. military spending. A fourth step would be to
shelve U.S. efforts to remilitarize Europe and Japan. Together, these four policy steps would
amount to a realistic strategy for crafting a less militarized, less distortedly masculinized foreign
policy.
A feminist-informed analyst always asks: "Which notions of manliness are shaping this policy
discussion?" and "Will the gap between women's and men's access to economic and political
influence be widened or narrowed by this particular policy option?" By deploying feminist
analytical tools, U.S. citizens can clarify decisions about whether to foster militarization as the
centerpiece of the post-Cold War international system. Moreover, by deploying feminist
analysis, Americans are much more likely to craft a u.s. foreign policy that will provide the
foundation for a long-lasting global structure of genuine security, one that ensures women,
both in the United States and abroad, an effective public voice.
War as Event Module – Cuomo
Treating war as an event that only happens when people are being shot or
fighting is fundamentally flawed – it ignores multiple forms of war due like
womyn’s oppression and ecological violence.
Cuomo 96 [Chris, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and Director of the Institute
for Women's Studies at the University of Georgia, “War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the
Significance of Everyday Violence” Published in Hypatia 11.4, p. 30-46]
Although my position is in agreement with the notion that war and militarism are feminist
issues, I argue that approaches to the ethics of war and peace which do not consider
“peacetime” military violence are inadequate for feminist and environmentalist concerns.
Because much of the military violence done to women and ecosystems happens outside the
boundaries of declared wars, feminist and environmental philosophers ought to emphasize
the significance of everyday military violence. Philosophical attention to war has typically
appeared in the form of justifi-cations for entering into war, and over appropriate activities
within war. The spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded sphere indicate
assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly removed from normal life, or a sort of
happening that is appropriately conceived apart from everyday events in peaceful times. Not
surprisingly, most discussions of the political and ethical dimensions of war discuss war solely
as an event—an occurrence, or collection of occurrences, having clear beginnings and endings
that are typi-cally marked by formal, institutional declarations. As happenings, wars and military
activities can be seen as motivated by identifiable, if complex, intentions, and directly enacted
by individual and collective decision-makers and agents of states. But many of the questions
about war that are of interest to feminists including how large-scale, state-sponsored violence
affects women and members of other oppressed groups; how military violence shapes
gen-dered, raced, and nationalistic political realities and moral imaginations; what such
violence consists of and why it persists; how it is related to other oppressive and violent
institutions and hegemonies—cannot be adequately pursued by focusing on events. These
issues are not merely a matter of good or bad intentions and identifiable decisions. In "Gender
and 'Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which war is currently best
seen not as an event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues that postmodern
understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well as the high-tech nature of much
contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and nationalist wars, render an eventbased conception of war inadequate, especially insofar as gender is taken into account. In this
essay, I will expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on
events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist consideration of the
political, ethical, and onto-logical dimensions of war and the possibilities for resistance demand
a much more complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence as a
point of departure, though I am not committed to the idea that the constancy of militarism, the
fact of its omnipresence in human experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war
are exclusive to contemporary postmodern or postcolonial circumstances) Theory that does not
investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the
depth and specificity of the every-day effects of militarism on women, on people living in
occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects
are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help
construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural
nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of
the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world
results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant pres-ence of
militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic
glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military
solutions for social problems.
The crisis-based politics of the status quo serve to quiet activism by appealing
to threats to security as the most deserving of consideration. In order to
combat violence, we have to rethinking our understanding of crisis.
Cuomo 96 [Chris, Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and Director of the Institute
for Women's Studies at the University of Georgia, “War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the
Significance of Everyday Violence” Published in Hypatia 11.4, p. 30-46]
Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are
woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisisbased politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create
alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because
they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent
systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives.
Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared
armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives
are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of
militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern
only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely
exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally
occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not
to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention
to declara-tions of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the
general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embed-ded in constant
military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is
happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and
other militaristic agents of the state. Moving away from crisis-driven politics and ontologies
concerning war and military violence also enables consideration of relationships among
seemingly disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and
practical forms of resistance. For example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a
presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the following:
how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive
presence and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in
which threats of state-sponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of
racism, nationalism, and corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities,
and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a
lens for considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled
"war." Given current American obsessions with nationalism, guns, and militias, and growing
hunger for the death penalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot
underestimate the need for philosophical and political attention to connec-tions among
phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded militaristic
campaigns.
A2:
A2: Perm
Perm fails – plan’s methodological and epistemological approach to
international relations is antithetical to that of feminist IR theory.
Tickner 01 [J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, Gendering World Politics:
Issues and Approaches in the Post–Cold War Era, p. 3-5]
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 4 introduction 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 conflictprone, 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 statecentric 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 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.
Realism cannot be assimilated into feminist theory – 3 warrants.
Tickner 01 [J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, Gendering World Politics:
Issues and Approaches in the Post–Cold War Era, p. 27-28]
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 public and private spheres and what counts as “important,” keep them from being heard.77
There’s no net benefit to assimilating women into patriarchy.
Peterson 92 [Spike, prof of Political Science at the U of Arizona, Gendered States: Feminist
(Re)Visions of International Relations Theory, p.8]
In general, the deconstructive project documents the extent and tenacity of androcentric bias
and the cultural codification of men as "knowers." It reveals women's exclusion from or
trivialization within masculinist accounts and, especially, women's "absence" there as agents of
social change. But even more significant, "adding women" to existing frameworks exposes
taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in those frameworks. Across disciplines, feminists
dis-cover the contradictions of "adding woman" to constructions that are literally defined by
their "man-ness": the public sphere, rationality, economic power, autonomy, political identity,
objectivity. The systematic inclusion of women—our bodies, activities, knowledge—
challenges categorical givens, disciplinary divisions, and theoretical frameworks. It became
increasingly clear that it was not possible simply to include women in those theories where
they had previously been excluded, for this exclusion forms a fundamental structuring
principle and key presumption of patriarchal discourse. It was not simply the range and scope
of objects that required transformation: more profoundly, and threateningly, the very questions
posed and the methods used to answer them . . . needed to be seriously questioned. The
political, ontological and epistemological commitments underlying patriarchal discourses, as
well as their theoretical contents required re-evaluation. 46 The reconstructive project marks
the shift "from recovering ourselves to critically examining the world from the perspective of
this recovery ... a move from margin to center." 47 Not simply seeking access to and
participating within (but from the margins of) androcentric paradigms, feminist reconstruction
explores the theoretical implications of revealing systemic masculinist bias and systematically
adding women. Not surprisingly, the shift from "women as knowable" to "women as knowers"
locates feminism at the heart of contemporary debates over what constitutes science and the
power of "claims to know." This is difficult terrain to map, so I start from a vantage point that I
hope is reasonably familiar.
A2: Realism
Realism is inherently masculine and makes violence inevitable
Tickner 92 [J. Ann, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for
International Studies at the University of Southern California, 1992. Gender in International
Relations, p. 41-44]
Behind this reification of state practices hide social institutions that are made and remade by
individual actions. In reality, the neorealist depiction of the state as a unitary actor is
grounded in the historical practices of the Western state system: neorealist characterizations
of state behavior, in terms of self-help, autonomy, and power seeking, privilege characteristics
associated with the Western construction of masculinity. Since the beginning of the state
system, the national security functions of states have been deeded to us through gendered
images that privilege masculinity. The Western state system began in seventeenth-century
Europe. As described by Charles Tilly, the modern state was born through war; leaders of
nascent states consolidated their power through the coercive extraction of resources and the
conquest of ever-larger territories. Success in war continued to be imperative for state survival
and the building of state apparatus.38 Throughout the period of state building in the West,
nationalist movements have used gendered imagery that exhorts masculine heroes to fight for
the establishment and defense of the mother country. The collective identity of citizens in most
states depends heavily on telling stories about, and celebration of, wars of independence or
national liberation and other great victories in battle. National anthems are frequently war
songs, just as holidays are celebrated with military parades and uniforms that recall great feats
in past conflicts. These collective historical memories are very important for the way in which
individuals define themselves as citizens as well as for the way in which states command
support for their policies, particularly foreign policy. Rarely, however, do they include
experiences of women or female heroes. While the functions of twentieth-century states extend
well beyond the provision of national security, national security issues, particularly in time of
war, offer a sense of shared political purpose lacking in most other areas of public policy.39 The
state continues to derive much of its legitimacy from its security function; it is for national
security that citizens are willing to make sacrifices, often unquestioningly.40 Military budgets
are the least likely area of public spending to be contested by politicians and the public, who are
often manipulated into supporting military spending by linking it with patriotism. When we
think about the state acting in matters of national security, we are entering a policy world
almost exclusively inhabited by men. Men make national security policy both inside and
outside the military establishment. Carol Cohn argues that strategic discourse, with its
emphasis on strength, stability, and rationality, bears an uncanny resemblance to the ideal
image of masculinity. Critics of U.S. nuclear strategy are branded as irrational and emotional. In
the United States, these “defense intellectuals” are almost all white men; Cohn tells us that
while their language is one of abstraction, it is loaded with sexual imagery.45 She claims that the
discourse employed in professional and political debates about U.S. security policy “would
appear to have colonized our minds and to have subjugated other ways of understanding
relations among states.” Cohn suggests that this discourse has become the only legitimate
response to questions of how best to achieve national security; it is a discourse far removed
from politics and people, and its deliberations go on disconnected from the functions they are
supposed to serve. Its powerful claim to legitimacy rests, in part, on the way national security
specialists view the international system.
The realism inherent in IR excludes women’s voices and femininity – this
prevents women from gaining influence in security policies
Blanchard 03 Instructor, School of International Relations, USC
Eric M., "Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory,"
Signs 28(4), Summer 2003, p.1292, http://webcurso.uc.cl/access/content/group/icp0301-1-212012/Parte%20B.%20Teor%C3%ADas%20de%20las%20Relaciones%20Internacionales/Blanchar
d,%20E%202003.pdf
Feminist incursions into the field of IR security can be usefully situated on the widening side of
the "widening" versus "narrowing" debate: the former argues that the scope of the neorealist
concept of security needs to be expanded to address a range of threats, utilize a broader
spectrum of methodologies, and address mounting ethical concerns (Kolodziej 1992); the latter
argues that a move beyond the study of military force would deal a serious blow to the field's
intellectual coherence while distracting from serious threats (Walt 1991). Critical security
discourse has generally invoked, but not engaged, feminist scholarship, and even approaches
that imagined societal sectors of security (Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde 1998) have yet to take
gender seriously (Hansen 2000).3 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 decisionmaking by pointing to the "extent to which
international politics is such a thoroughly masculinized sphere of activity that women's voices
are considered inauthentic" (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).
Realism ignores human agency and identity and excludes all that is feminine
Blanchard 03 Blanchard 03 Instructor, School of International Relations, USC
Eric M., "Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory,"
Signs 28(4), Summer 2003, p.1312, http://webcurso.uc.cl/access/content/group/icp0301-1-212012/Parte%20B.%20Teor%C3%ADas%20de%20las%20Relaciones%20Internacionales/Blanchar
d,%20E%202003.pdf
An important component of the study of IR is a self-positioning 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). Jean
Bethke Elshtain's rich blend of political theory, personal narrative, and history, Women and War
([1987] 1995), serves as a rejoinder to the discipline's philosophical conceit and issues a key
challenge to the domestic/international divide that Grant identifies. In a sweeping survey of the
discourse of war from the Greeks onward, Elshtain details women's complex relationships to the
body politic, and thus to war, as they emerge from the narratives (war stories) that are
constitutive of war. Elshtain focuses on the ways in which war's "productive destructiveness"
inscribes and reinscribes men's and women's identities and thus the boundaries of
community: "War creates the people. War produces power, individual and collective" (166-67).
Reacting to what she sees as the onset of scientism and hyperrationality in academic IR, Elshtain
critiques the retreat into abstraction that the quest for scientific certainty produced in
"professionalized" war discourse and attempts to revive the bond between politics and morality
broken by Machiavelli. By reifying state behavior, Elshtain argues, the realist narrative ignores
human agency and identity: "No children are ever born, and nobody ever dies, in this
constructed world. There are states, and they are what is" (91).4
A2: Essentialism
We associate feminism, not women, with peace – the distinction is critical to
problematizing essentialism and masculinity.
Tickner 01 [J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, Gendering World Politics:
Issues and Approaches in the Post–Cold War Era, p. 60-61]
While this essentializing association of women with peace is problematic, it is the case that
women in the United States have consistently shown less support for forceful means of
pursuing foreign-policy goals than men, and this gender gap continues to grow. It was widest at
the time of the Gulf War of 1991—although it closed somewhat once the fighting had begun.83
It has also been suggested that those who oppose military intervention are among those most
likely to support feminist goals, a claim supported by an analysis of attitudes toward the peace
process in the Middle East. A study of Israeli, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Kuwaiti attitudes
toward the Arab/Israeli conflict, broken down by sex, found that men and women did not have
different attitudes and there was no evidence of women being less militaristic. Using data
collected between 1988 and 1994, the study did, however, find a strong positive correlation
between attitudes toward support for equality of women and support for diplomacy and
compromise. The authors therefore saw a connection between feminism and positive attitudes
about the resolution of international conflict.84 This example is instructive; reducing unequal
gender hierarchies could make a positive contribution to peace and social justice. Likewise, by
moving beyond dichotomous ways of thinking about war and peace, problematizing the social
construction of gender hierarchies, and exposing myths about male protection that these ways
of thinking promote, we would be able to construct less-gendered and more-inclusive
definitions of security. Offering a counterposition that rejects both the masculinity of war and a
feminine peace, Mary Burguieres has argued for building a feminist security framework on
common, ungendered foundations. She has suggested a role for feminism in dismantling the
imagery that underlies patriarchy and militarism and a joint effort in which both women and
men would be responsible for changing existing structures.85 Such efforts require a
problematization of dichotomized constructions such as war and peace and realism and
idealism in order to provide new ways of understanding these phenomena that can help us
envisage a more robust notion of security.
Framework
ROB – Renegotiation of Knowledge
The role of the ballot becomes a negotiation of knowledge, a deciding of axes
and boundaries. Evaluate our critique by its ability to reorient political
perception and action.
Bleiker 2000 [Roland, coordinator of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program @ U of
Queensland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics, p. Google books]
Describing, explaining and prescribing may be less unproblematic processes of evaluation, but
only at first sight. If one abandons the notion of Truth, the idea that an event can be
apprehended as part of a natural order, authentically and scientifically, as something that exists
independently of the meaning we have given it – if one abandons this separation of object and
subject, then the process of judging a particular approach to describing and explaining an
event becomes a very muddled affair. There is no longer an objective measuring device that
can set the standard to evaluate whether or not a particular insight into an event, such as the
collapse of the Berlin Wall, is true or false. The very nature of a past event becomes
indeterminate insofar as its identification is dependent upon ever-changing forms of linguistic
expressions that imbue the event with meaning.56 The inability to determine objective
meanings is also the reason why various critical international relations scholars stress that there
can be no ultimate way of assessing human agency. Roxanne Doty, for instance, believes that
the agent–structure debate ‘encounters an aporia, i.e., a self-engendered paradox beyond
which it cannot press’. This is to say that the debate is fundamentally undecidable, and that
theorists who engage in it ‘can claim no scientific, objective grounds for determining whether
the force of agency or that of structure is operative at any single instant’.57 Hollis and Smith
pursue a similar line of argument. They emphasise that there are always two stories to tell –
neither of which is likely ever to have the last word – an inside story and an outside story, one
about agents and another about structures, one epistemological and the other ontological, one
about understanding and one about explaining international relations.58 The value of an insight
cannot be evaluated in relation to a set of objectively existing criteria. But this does not mean
that all insights have the same value. Not every perception is equally perceptive. Not every
thought is equally thoughtful. Not every action is equally justifiable. How, then, can one judge?
Determining the value of a particular insight or action is always a process of negotiating
knowledge, of deciding where its rotating axes should be placed and how its outer boundaries
should be drawn. The actual act of judging can thus be made in reference to the very process
of negotiating knowledge. The contribution of the present approach to understanding
transversal dissent could, for instance, be evaluated by its ability to demonstrate that a
rethinking of the agency problematique has revealed different insights into global politics. The
key question then revolves around whether or not a particular international event, like the fall
of the Berlin Wall, appears in a new light once it is being scrutinised by an approach that pays
attention to factors that had hitherto been ignored. Expressed in other words, knowledge
about agency can be evaluated by its ability to orient and reorient our perceptions of events
and the political actions that issue from them. The lyrical world, once more, offers valuable
insight. Rene´ Char: A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Only traces bring about
dreams.
Epistemology First
View their claims as suspect – realist knowledge has been shaped by masculine
epistemology.
Tickner 92 [J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, Gender in International
Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, p.13-14]
Since, as I have suggested, the world of international politics is a masculine domain, how could
feminist perspectives contribute anything new to its academic discourses? Many male scholars
have already noted that, given our current technologies of destruction and the high degree of
economic inequality and environmental degradation that now exists, we are desperately in
need of changes in the way world politics is conducted; many of them are attempting to
prescribe such changes. For the most part, however, these critics have ignored the extent to
which the values and assumptions that drive our contemporary international system are
intrinsically related to concepts of masculinity; privileging these values constrains the options
available to states and their policymakers. All knowledge is partial and is a function of the
knower's lived experience in the world. Since knowledge about the behavior of states in the
international system depends on assumptions that come out of men's experiences, it ignores a
large body of human experience that has the potential for increasing the range of options and
opening up new ways of thinking about interstate practices. Theoretical perspectives that
depend on a broader range of human experience are important for women and men alike, as we
seek new ways of thinking about our contemporary dilemmas.
Anti Sexist Politics / Individual Rejection Key
Sexism is embedded in our society – we need to integrate gender into our
struggles and discussions
Chew 07 staff, Chinese Progressive Association
[Huibin Amee, June 16 2007, "Left Turn: Notes from the Global Intifada,"
http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/699]
This shallow vision of gender justice has so permeated even progressive circles, that our very
definition of sexism is circumscribed. Too often, sexism is merely seen as a set of cultural
behaviors or personal biases; challenging sexism is simply seen as breaking these gender
expectations. But sexism is an institutionalized system, with historical, political, and economic
dimensions. Just as it was built on white supremacy and capitalism, this country was built on
patriarchy—on the sexual subjugation of women whether in war or “peace”, slavery or
conquest; on the abuse of our reproductive capacity; the exploitation of both our paid and
unpaid labor. Truly taking on an anti-sexist agenda means uprooting institutional patriarchy.
To do so we must first, as a society, overcome our fears of addressing feminist issues and
views. A deep analysis of how patriarchy operates is typically absent across progressive
organizing in the US—whether for affordable housing, demilitarization, immigrant rights, or
worker rights. In all of these struggles, women are heavily affected, and moreover, affected
disproportionately in gendered ways, as women. Yet too often, organizers working on these
issues do not recognize how they are gendered. In the process, they prioritize men’s
experiences, and perpetuate sexism. Gender is ghettoized, rather than fully integrated into
radical struggles. Appended to the main concerns of other movements, it is at best engaged on
a single-issue, not systemic basis.
AFF
Perm – Realism
Realism isn’t totally wrong—it is a necessary starting point for incorporation of
feminist perspectives—the totalizing nature of the alternative fails and the
perm solves best
Jones 96 [Adam, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia,
“Does 'Gender' Make the World Go Round? Feminist Critiques of International Relations,”
Review of International Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 405-429]
On what specific assumptions and underpinnings of Realism have recent feminist critiques
tended to centre? I will take these in turn, proceeding from Realism’s epistemological
assumptions to some of the more policy-specific outgrowths of the ‘Realist mindset’. Again, it is
necessary to bear in mind that most of these critiques do not originate with feminism, nor are
they unique to it. What is distinctive about the feminist orientation is the incorporation of the
gender variable, and the exploration of its influence on women and (to a lesser extent) society
as a whole. Opposing dualisms: For the most recent wave of proponents of the so-called
reflexive turn in international relations, no epistemological issue is so central as the positivist
division of experience into discrete knower and objective known. One has the sense that for
post-positivists, scientific rationalism constitutes a kind of Original Sin from which all other
transgressions—domination, exploitation, subjugation, even annihilation—follow more or less
as a matter of course. It is worth pointing out the criticisms of Realism that seem to derive, in
large part, from the increasingly popular post-positivist feminist stance. Prime among these is
the depiction of Realism as inextricably bound up with a hierarchical world order. This order is,
in turn, predicated on the kind of subject/object distinctions that post-positivists reject. Realists
depict themselves and their craft as adopting a dispassionate, ‘objective’ critical stance, standing
epistemologically outside the world of international politics, though normatively committed to
and engaged with it. Post-positivist feminists, instead see Realism as constructed and bolstered
by political hierarchies that generate both rigid conceptual dichotomies. In these feminist eyes,
then, the Realist project is compromised from the start. Claims to scholarly autonomy and
dispassionate observation are untenable. To analyze the world in Realist terms is to perpetuate
an unjust status quo. If the most influential strands of feminism tend now toward a postpositivist orientation, this is not to ignore the strong (and once dominant) strain of feminism
that concentrates its efforts on supplementing classical frameworks by incorporating the
gender variable. The liberal-feminist tradition tends to view existing structures as masculinist
by composition, but not necessarily by definition. It therefore seeks to open up these
structures—political, economic, academic—to female candidates and contributions. From this
viewpoint, epistemological orientations such as empiricism are seen as innately human, even
if their practical and especially public application has ordinarily been a male preserve.
Although, as noted, the prominence of this liberal perspective has decline in recent years, there
are signs that it may be staging a comeback as some of the more paradoxical and stifling
aspects of post-positivism become evident. I do not wish to suggest that all feminists view
Realism and a feminist approach to IR as utterly incompatible. One element of the ongoing
debate between liberal feminists and their post-positivist counterparts is the occasional
recognition that, as with other ‘patriarchal’ paradigms or institutions, Realism may not be so
deeply compromised as to require jettisoning. In her appraisal of Hans J. Morgenthau, for
instance, Tickner criticizes Realism as only a ‘partial description of international politics’,
owing to its deeply embedded masculinist bias. But partial descriptions are partial
descriptions; they are not dead wrong. Tickner attacks Morgenthau’s paradigm on several
grounds. But her main concern is to offer a ‘feminist reformulation’ of certain Realist
principles. In a similar vein, the central problem may not be with objectivity as such, but with
objectivity ‘as it is culturally defined… [and] associated with masculinity’. The idea of the
‘national interest’ likewise needs to be rendered more ‘multidimensional and contextually
contingent’, but not necessarily abandoned. Tickner stresses: ‘I am not denying the validity of
Morgenthau’s world’. Just as Kathy Ferguson emphasizes the importance of ‘negotiat[ing]
respectfully with contentious other’. A similar approach is evident in Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas,
Beaches and Bases, perhaps the best-known work of feminist IR criticism. Enloe attempts to
supplement the classical framework by considering women’s contributions and experiences. But
she does not devalue or reject the framework as such. Thus, Enloe looks at international
diplomacy, geostrategic military alliances (as symbolized by military bases), international
tourism, and the First World-Third World economic relations. The first two are hallmark
concerns of the classical paradigm. The third and fourth derive from neo-Marxist and IPE
theories. In each case, Enloe presents innovative avenues of inquiry, and in intriguing reworking
of perspectives that have grown stale. Her study of international diplomacy, for example,
concentrates on the role of diplomatic wives in structuring the ‘informal relationships’ that
enable male diplomats ‘to accomplish their political tasks’. Women, she argues, are ‘vital to
creating and maintaining trust between men in a hostile world’; negotiations “man-to-man” are
most likely to go smoothly if they can take place outside official settings, in the “private” sphere
of the home or at gatherings that include wives’. But Enloe does not seem to be proposing a
revision of what constitutes ‘the business of international politics’, however critical she may
be of the way this business operates, or of the (underacknowledged) supporting roles women
play in the business. Scholars have always mined the past for insights and guidance. There is a
curiosity, a generosity of spirit, in much feminist writing that may facilitate a provisional
modus vivendi, though hardly an alliance, between Realist and feminist scholarship. This
would demand of the classical tradition that it acknowledge and correct its blank spaces and
biased formulations. Feminism, meanwhile, could glean from Realism some sharp insights into
the limited but significant veins of international politics that the classical tradition has long
mined, and not without success. Rather less of a cause for optimism is the hollow claim by
some feminist IR scholars that they are constructing a radically new theorizing of international
relations, and a research agenda to guide the project. In my view, it is the post-positivist lines
of analysis that exhibits the widest disparity between stated ambition and substantive
contribution. Given this strand’s recent prominence, it is worth considering the claims of one
of its major exponents in some detail. Christine Sylvester’s 1994 Feminist Theory and
International Relations in a Postmodern Era angrily rejects the notion that feminist theory out to
be playing essentially a supplementary role. Criticizing Robert Keohane for proposing something
along these lines Sylvester writes: Explicit in this analysis is yet another support for “women.”
We who are feminists in the academy are urged to come out of our vague and homeless
position in IR in order to provide something that the mainstream [sic] needs and cannot think
through and provide using its own powers for reflection… There is, in this admonition, little
sense that feminists can set an agenda for ourselves and for IR and really no sense that we may
want to interface differently and rewrite-repaint-recook the field rather than join it. But the
specifics of the ‘re-visioning’, in Sylvester’s formulation, seem meager. ‘It would be refreshing to
see a recreation of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the situated standpoint of John McCone’s wife’,
Sylvester writes, because she ‘experienced, and perhaps even influenced, the first round of the
bureaucratic politics game’. This is the sole concrete example of a feminist-influenced research
agenda that Sylvester advances in a chapter-long discussion of the ‘second debate’ in IR theory.
Perhaps such an inquiry would be refreshing, but there is frankly little to indicate that it would
be revelatory. And there is no evidence so far the investigations of this type could lead to a
radically new theorizing of IR. One would expect, instead, more in the way of historical
footnotes. Sylvester’s more detailed attempts to ‘move beyond analysis by metaphor’ and
‘repaint the canvases of IR’ similarly bog down in movements, setting, and phenomena—the
Greenham Common women and Zimbabwean agricultural cooperatives.
A2: State Link
The belief that the state is always-already patriarchal is a fiction that prevents
the women’s movement from securing lasting changes in gender relations.
Rhode 94 [Deborah L.: Professor, Stanford Law School; Director, Institute for Research on
Women and Gender, Stanford University, April 1994, Harvard Law Review, 107 Harv. L. Rev.
1181, p. 1184-1186]
In many left feminist accounts, the state is a patriarchal institution in the sense that it reflects
and institutionalizes male dominance. Men control positions of official power and men's
interests determine how that power is exercised. According to Catharine MacKinnon, the
state's invocation of neutrality and objectivity ensures that, "[t]hose who have freedoms like
equality, liberty, privacy and speech socially keep them legally, free of governmental intrusion."
n15 In this view, "the state protects male power [by] appearing to prohibit its excesses when
necessary to its normalization." n16 So, for example, to the extent that abortion functions "to
facilitate male sexual access to women, access to abortion will be controlled by 'a man or The
Man.'" n17 Other theorists similarly present women as a class and elaborate the ways in which
even state policies ostensibly designed to assist women have institutionalized their
subordination. n18 So, for example, welfare programs stigmatize female recipients without
providing the support that would enable them to alter their disadvantaged status. n19 In
patriarchal accounts, the choice for many women is between dependence [*1185] on an
intrusive and insensitive bureaucracy, or dependence on a controlling or abusive man. n20
Either situation involves sleeping with the enemy. As Virginia Woolf noted, these public and
private spheres of subordination are similarly structured and "inseparably connected; . . . the
tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other." n21 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 sexbased inequality and in the strategies necessary to address it.
State Key
The state can use its power to further feminist goals.
Tickner 01 [J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, Gendering World Politics:
Issues and Approaches in the Post–Cold War Era, p. 97-98]
While the relative absence of women from political institutions has led feminists, particularly
Western feminists, to be suspicious of the state, they are also questioning visions of alternative
models that advocate the devolution of power up to international governmental institutions,
where often there are even fewer women in decision-making positions. Universal norms, such
as standards of human rights, articulated at the international level are also being examined for
gender bias. Typically, women’s movements, which strive for what they claim is a more genuine
form of democracy, have been situated at the local level or in nongovernmental transnational
social movements. As discussed in chapter 3, feminists have stressed the importance of these
movements, not only in terms of their attempts to place women’s issues on the international
agenda, but also in terms of their success in redefining political theory and practice and thinking
more deeply about oppressive gender relations and how to reconstitute them. However, certain
feminists have begun to question whether women’s participation in these nongovernmental
arenas can have sufficient power to effect change; while they remain skeptical of the
patriarchal underpinnings of many contemporary states, certain feminists are now beginning to
reexamine the potential of the state as an emancipatory institution. Particularly for women
and feminists from the South, democratization has opened up some space within which to
leverage the state to deal with their concerns; many of them see the state as having the
potential to provide a buffer against an international system dominated by its most powerful
members. However, a genuinely democratic state, devoid of gender and other oppressive social
hierarchies, would require a different definition of democracy, citizenship, and human rights, as
well as a different relationship with the international system.
Realism
No gender bias in international relations actually exists—feminist criticism is
based upon exaggerated mischaracterizations of realism and is riddled with
contradictions—realism solves their offense
Murray 97 [professor of politics at the University of Wales, 1997 (Alistair, Reconstructing
Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics, netlibrary]
Consequently, Tickner claims that feminist perspectives on national security take us beyond
realism’s statist representations. Whilst Tickner’s feminism presents an interesting revisioning
of international relations, it ultimately suffers from the problem that, in order to sustain any of
its claims, most of all the notion that a distinctively feminist epistemology is actually necessary,
it must establish the existence of a gender bias in international relations theory which simply
does not exist, and the existence of an alternative feminist position on international affairs
which is simply a fiction. Consequently, in order to salvage her very raison d^etre, Tickner is
forced to engage in some imaginative rewriting of international relations theory. First in order
to lay the basis for the claim that an alternative perspective is actually necessary,
conventional theory is stripped of its positive elements, and an easily discredited caricature,
centered on realism, erected in its place. Second, in order to conjure up a reason for this
alternative perspective to be a feminist one, the positive elements which have been removed
from conventional theory are then claimed as the exclusive preserve of such perspectives. Yet,
however imaginative this “revisioning” of international relations theory, its inevitable result is a
critique which is so riddled with contradictions that is proves unsustainable, and an
alternative epistemology which, based on this flawed critique, collapses in the face of the
revelation of its inadequacy.
Fem IR isn’t needed to address “the root cause” of global problems—realism
achieves the same goals
Murray 97 [Alastair J. H. Murray, Professor of Politics @ U of Wales, 1997 (Reconstructing
Realism: Between Power Politics and Cosmopolitan Ethics) p. 192-193]
Consequently, it is not surprising that the third strut of this new feminist epistemology, a
broader notion of national security, seems simply unnecessary. Acknowledging the
interdependence of human security in an age of nuclear holocaust and environmental
degeneration would hardly seem to be a preserve of feminism. What of everything that
George Kennan has said on this subject over the last forty years? Nor can we accept the notion
that we need to redefine conflict resolution to focus more on mutually beneficial outcomes,
when realism is deeply concerned with the amelioration of difference by diplomacy. What of
the nine points with which Morgenthau concludes Politics among Nations? Nor can we accept
the notion that `maternal thinking' and a female, contextual morality are required to attempt
to confine conflict to non-violent means. A persistent theme of realism is that humility of self
and toleration of others are the foremost moral imperatives, that conflict should not be
permitted to become an ideological war of absolutes in which all enemies are monsters, all
actions are legitimate, and all peaces are but punitive armistices. One ultimately has to
question the need for a specifically feminist theory of international relations. We currently do
not have two radically opposed standpoints, masculine and feminine, but a unified human
standpoint which, with modifications, serves us reasonably well.
Alt Fails / Perm Solvency
The alternative fails—relies too much on utopian criticism and fails to provide
policy alternatives. A combination of problem-solving solutions and critical
analysis is best to explain world events.
Keohane 98 [Robert, Professor of Political Science at Princeton, “Beyond Dichotomy:
Conversations between International Relations and Feminist Theory,” International Studies
Quarterly, March 98, Vol. 42 Issue 1, p 194-5]
Taking scholarly work seriously, however, involves not only trying to read it sympathetically, but also offering criticism of arguments
that do not seem convincing. My starting point is to accept an insight of much feminist writing: conceptual dichotomies create
misleading stereotypes. Professor Tickner mentions four: rational/irrational, fact/value, universal/particular, and public/private. As
feminists point out, gender—the social construction of sexual differences—operates largely through the use of such stereotypes.
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 “problemsolving” 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, postpositivist, 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 most 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 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 v. post-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 objectivistsubjectivist 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 a constraining them. It seems illadvised 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
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: movement 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.
Alt Fails
The alt results in the same practices it hopes to prevent, and fails to secure
knowledge claims which could cause real change.
Stern and Zalewski 09
[Maria Stern, researcher, department of peace and development research @ Gotberg University
and Marysia Zalewski, director of centre for gender studies @ University of Aberdeen, 2009,
“Feminist fatigue(s): Reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarization”]
In this section we clarify what we mean by the problem of sex/gender and how it transpires in
the context of feminist narratives within IR – which we will exemplify below with a recounting of
a familiar feminist reading of militarisation. To re-iterate, the primary reason for investigating
this is that we suspect part of the reason for the aura of disillusionment around feminism –
especially as a critical theoretical resource – is connected to the sense that feminist stories
repeat the very grammars that initially incited them as narratives in resistance. To explain; one
might argue that there has been a normative feminist failure to adequately construct secure
foundations for legitimate and authoritative knowledge claims upon which to garner effective
and permanent gender change, particularly in regard to women. But for poststructural scholars
this failure is not surprising as the emancipatory visions of feminism inevitably emerged as
illusory given the attachments to foundationalist and positivistic understandings of subjects,
power and agency. If, as poststructuralism has shown us, we cannot – through language –
decide the meaning of woman, or of femininity, or of feminism, or produce foundational
information about it or her;42 that subjects are ‘effects’ rather than ‘origins of institutional
practices and discourses’;43 that power ‘produces subjects in effects’;44 or that authentic and
authoritative agency are illusory – then the sure foundations for the knowledge that feminist
scholars are conventionally required to produce – even hope to produce – are unattainable.
Moreover, post-colonial feminisms have vividly shown how representations of ‘woman’ or
‘women’ which masquerade as ‘universal’ are, instead, universalising and inevitably produced
through hierarchical and intersecting power relations.45 In sum; the poststructural suggestion
is that feminist representations of women do not correspond to some underlying truth of what
woman is or can be; rather feminism produces the subject of woman which it then
subsequently comes to represent.46 The implications of this familiar conundrum are farreaching as the demands of feminism in the context of the knowledge/political project of the
gender industry are exposed as implicated in the re-production of the very power from which
escape is sought. In short, feminism emerges as complicit in violent reproductions of subjects
and knowledges/ practices. How does this recognisable puzzle (recognisable within feminist
theory) play out in relation to the issues we are investigating in this article? As noted above, the
broad example we choose to focus on to explain our claims is militarisation; partly chosen as
both authors have participated in pedagogic, policy and published work in this generic area, and
partly because this is an area in which the demand for operationalisable gender knowledge is
ever-increasing. Our suggestion is that the increasing requirement47 for knowledge for the
gender industry about gender and militarisation re-animates the sexgender paradox which
persistently haunts attempts to translate what we know into useful knowledge for redressing
(and preventing) conflict, or simply into hopeful scenarios for our students.
A2: Root Cause
Patriarchy doesn't explain war—peace is more common, and patriarchal
structures cannot be treated as constants
Levy 98 [Jack, Prof. Pol. Sci. – Rutgers, Senior Associate – Saltzman Institute of War and Peace
Studies, and Past President – International Studies Association, Annual Review of Political
Science, “The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace”, 1:139-165]
Another exception to the focus on variations in war and peace can be found in some feminist
theorizing about the outbreak of war, although most feminist work on war focuses on the
consequences of war, particularly for women, rather than on the outbreak of war (Elshtain
1987, Enloe 1990, Peterson 1992, Tickner 1992, Sylvester 1994). The argument is that the
gendered nature of states, cultures, and the world system contributes to the persistence of war
in world politics. This might provide an alternative (or supplement) to anarchy as an answer to
the first question of why violence and war repeatedly occur in international politics, although
the fact that peace is more common than war makes it difficult to argue that patriarchy (or
anarchy) causes war. Theories of patriarchy might also help answer the second question of
variations in war and peace, if they identified differences in the patriarchal structures and
gender relations in different international and domestic political systems in different historical
contexts, and if they incorporated these differences into empirically testable hypotheses about
the outbreak of war. This is a promising research agenda, and one that has engaged some
anthropologists. Most current feminist thinking in political science about the outbreak of war,
however, treats gendered systems and patriarchal structures in the same way that neorealists
treat anarchy—as a constant—and consequently it cannot explain variations in war and
peace.
Turn – Equating Militarism and Patriarchy Makes Things Worse
Equating militarism and patriarchy assumes traditional gender roles and
reinforces domination
hooks 95 [bell, English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of
Southern California “Feminism and Militarism: A Comment” Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 23,
No. 3/4, Rethinking Women's Peace Studies (Fall - Winter, 1995), pp. 58-64]
By equaling militarism and patriarchy, these feminists often structure their arguments in such
a way as to suggest that to be male is synonymous with strength, aggression, and the will to
dominate and do violence to others and that to be female is synonymous with weakness,
passivity, and the will to nourish and affirm the lives of others. While these may be
stereotypical norms that many people live out, such dualistic thinking is dangerous; it is a basic
ideological component of the logic that informs and promotes domination in Western society.
Even when inverted and employed for a meaningful purpose, like nuclear disarmament, it is
nevertheless risky, for it reinforces the cultural basis of sexism and other forms of group
oppression, suggesting as it does that women and men are inherently different in some fixed
and absolute way. It implies that women by virtue of our sex have played no crucial role in
supporting and upholding imperialism (and the militarism that serves to maintain imperialist
rule) or other systems of domination. Often the women who make such assertions arc white.
Black women are very likely to feel strongly that white women have been quite violent and
militaristic in their support and maintenance of racism.