Men in the Feminist Gaze: What Does this Mean in IR?

Abstract

Some of the contributors to the 1988 and 1998 special issues of Millennium on women/gender and IR queried conventional accounts of sex and gender. Some of these put down markers for the study of sexuality in IR. The political thrust of this enterprise was broadly inclusive in character, deriving from various forms of identity politics, while also presuming a transformative outcome of some sort. A few contributors looked forward to a world beyond the confines of gender hierarchy. This article poses the question: 'What would it be like if “feminist IR” actually were “IR tout court ”?' Answering this question requires a non-referential theory of language that goes 'all the way down' — as the 'constructivism' deployed in IR does not, because it relies instead on an unexamined acceptance of 'the material'. The answer also requires an analytical view of masculinity as both apparently ungendered and overtly gendered, thus asymmetrical with femininity. Following through on this analysis resolves the dilemma that many IR feminists feel they face: how to sustain a critique of the manly content and masculinized framing of IR without reinvoking the gender binary through which 'woman' and the feminine are always and already subordinated to men and masculinity, and marginalized as subject and object of knowledge.