Neg

1nc 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 masks the structural violence that impacts women
everyday
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. 112113]
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,
16072). 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 statethey are always
disproportionately affected by war, forced migration, famine, and other
forms of social, political, and economic turmoil (Mohanty 2002, 514; Tickner
2001, 501). 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
womens bodies to justify U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan,
feminist analyses of international relations must broaden the concept of
security, in J. Ann Tickners 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 womens 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.

<Insert Specific Link(s)>

Masculine views of IR exclude other possible solutions, that
makes warfare and policy failure inevitable
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
Bushs 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 Bushs 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 womens 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 decisionmaking 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 administrations miscalculations
underestimating the al-Qaeda threat before 9/11, overestimating Iraqs 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 invasionwere
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
groups chances of success and the righteousness of its cause, while neglecting to
test assumptions about policy options and, consequently, underestimating

their drawbacks and vulnerabilities. Bushs personality predisposes him

toward certainty, rather than nuanced reflection, introspection, or selfcriticism (Suskind, 2004b). This trait may have led him to expect an easy victory in
Iraq. Bushs faith may have also constituted a motivated bias that led Bush to
minimize risks and to favor a policy of confrontation. Bushs lack of cognitive
complexitythe 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 policys
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 Bushs 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 Bushs personal animosity toward Iraqs 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

Africa
Their political simulation only pays deference to a broken, and
corrupt foreign policy that never challenges militarism and a
deeply entrenched history of exploitation that has destroyed
those of the African population. Challenging militarism through
a feminist analysis is a better starting point for creating the
necessary pedagogy for liberation.
McFadden 8 (Patricia, Patricia McFadden is a radical African feminist, sociologist, writer, educator, and
publisher from Swaziland. She is also an activist and scholar who worked in the anti-apartheid movement for more
than 20 years. She received her Ph. D from the University of Warwick, Interrogating Americana: an African feminist
critique, Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and
Minnie Bruce Pratt, pgs 62-65)//JS

Africans are
treated in ways that reproduce the colonial, racist representations of a
people who are helpless and inept; victims of brutal and corrupt states
whose leaders are constructed as either well behaved or demonic . Those
of us who study Africa and the numerous societies of the South know that such
representations reflect the othering of people whose societies have been
systematically plundered and repressed through well-entrenched systems
of economic exploitation, political manipulation and racist media practices
that go hand in hand with the unscrupulous, predatory activities of global
corporate enterprises that are protected by Western states, through
military intervention and/or through so-called diplomatic intervention . Ruling
Invariably, I turn to Africa, as an African feminist. Generally, in the US and European academies,

classes have the same interests and engage in the same repressive practices everywhere. What is of particular

the
US state has been especially vicious in its operations within Africa since
the period of nationalist independence in the 1960s. Central to the US
strategy of warmongering in Africa has been the strategy of creating and
using proxy armies bandits who rampage across the landscapes of our
worlds, specifically countries considered essential to US or European
strategic interests; thugs who are trained, funded and protected by the
USA in particular, within the global arena. In this regard, US presidents Ronald Reagan and
interest to me, however, as a feminist who is engaged in the analysis of war as statecraft, is the fact that

Bill Clinton were kindred spirits in the furtherance of an imperial project that exposed the myth of difference
between them and their respective political parties, and the claim that this society engages in a diverse and

Across the African continent, the USA has

systematically installed brutally repressive regimes, paying scant
attention to the consequences of such fascistic intervention, and in many
instances has laid the ground for the proliferation of wars in numerous
countries which have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Africans,
mainly women, older people and children. Countries like the Democratic Republic of the
pluralistic politics (Martin 2001).

Congo (DRC), Angola, Chad, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Mozambique represent the most vicious expressions
of US imperial impunity, and their people have been subjected to and continue to suffer unimaginable atrocities and

Angola and the DRC (formerly Zaire) are both countries with
exceptional wealth in mineral and oil resources, biodiversity and other
forms of natural wealth. Yet they feature at the bottom of the list of the
poorest countries in the world. Three decades of carnage and
deprivations.

imperialistic machination, carried out through the brutal acts of

bandits and mercenaries, have achieved the goals of US
corporations and the US state in terms of destroying and
destabilizing these and many other societies, leaving their wealth

readily accessible to the elites of the USA and Europe, while the
Africans are vilified as hopeless, corrupt and barbaric (Elich 2006). For

the DRC, it all began when, in 1961, the CIA installed Mobutu, a low-level
military official, after it had engineered a coup, and assassinated and
incinerated the body of the democratically elected leader of Zaire Patrice
Lumumba. Mobutu was a well-behaved native he opened up the
countrys resources to US, Belgian and Canadian multinationals, which
proceeded to engage in the most astounding acts of plunder of that
countrys wealth for over forty years. By the time he had become useless to the West in the
1990s, the country was a wreck and the people had been remobilized under sectarian ethnic identities, devastated
and torn apart by war (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002; Baregu 1999; DeWitte 2001; Hochschild 1999; Mandaza 1999).

Bandits under the patronage of various European states have been waging
a war of attrition and incalculable destruction on the working people of
that country until very recently, and millions of Congolese women,
children, elderly and youth have been traumatized, brutalized, raped and
murdered. According to Cecile Pouilly (2007), writing in the UNHCR magazine REFUGEES, The statistics
are numbing: over 12,000 reported rapes in eastern DRC alone in the six
months up to October 2006; as many as 3.4 million internally displaced
people (IDPs) at the peak in 2003; around 4 million deaths attributed
directly or indirectly to the 19982003 war, and one in five children dead
before the age of five. At the core of this so-called civil war (a crucial point that none of the UN or US
media actually ever spells out) is the question of which state/ corporation will continue to control and exploit the
immense resources of the DRC. The eastern DRC is an especially critical area for the extraction of the rare minerals
that the US and European armies (and societies) need for their sophisticated military industries, and for the
provision of what have become considered essential accessories of a modern lifestyle in the West. The cellphone is
one such item dependent upon the mining of coltan, a rare mineral found only in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo and controlled by a handful of European mining companies, whose compounds are guarded mainly by white
former South African military elements, now mercenaries (also in Iraq and in various other war zones). Side by side
with the extraction of rare minerals are the mobilization and fomentation of internecine wars, which have claimed

When I
listen even to the supposedly progressive US radio stations like National
Public Radio, however, let alone the mainstream media, I hardly if ever hear an analysis of US involvement
the lives of over five million Africans mostly women and children across the heart of the continent.

in the destruction of governments that were on the side of the working people of Africa. What one gets, which has
permeated even to certain schools of feminist analysis of violation and war in Africa, is a repetition of the same old

the persistent representation of African women in

particular as victims of state and male violence. Apparently, it is easier to
present African women as helpless and in need of rescue. It takes more
courage to actually step back from the normalized racism about Africans,
and imagine an even greater sense of solidarity and self-introspection so
as to contextualize the African state as a politico-military and economic
collusionary relationship between African and Western ruling classes that
share many common interests. US feminists have to look for information
about the politics and practices of the state in Africa and integrate that
knowledge into the ongoing analysis of war and imperial pursuit . Referring to
stupid racist stereotypes, the lies and

Rwanda and Sierra Leone anecdotally or proclaiming the election of a woman in Liberia as a great achievement are

The recontextualization of US feminism in relation to the

jingoism and destruction of societies outside US borders will be more
useful to the global feminist movement as well, and it will stimulate the
emergence of a different kind of feminist analysis; one that breaks with
the demands made upon individual feminists and progressive communities
that they not question the essentials of what makes US society American.
only perfunctory exercises.

Such a stance will also stimulate a more critical assessment and consideration of the ways in which militarization
has seeped into the consciousness of US citizens (not only in the blatant ways in which it socially and economically
coerces Africans and Latino/a Americans to rely upon that institution for access to the most basic elements of a
middleclass lifestyle), at a cost vastly disproportionate to the benefits that accrue to them, particularly for the
young people in these communities at the present time.

The insidious replication of

militarization as fashion, worn and performed by young women and men in

US society, and transformed into an everyday event, into an uncritical
item of daily living, requires a deeper and more considered scrutiny than
has been forthcoming thus far. The reshaping of social consciousness in
ways that are deeply embedded in practices and habits that feed and give
license to impunity and supremacy must be a cause of widespread
theoretical and activist attention, leading to resistance among all
feminists, everywhere.

Democracy
The worst atrocities happen under the guise of a democracy,
fem key to resolving the link
Davis 08 (Angela Y., American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a prominent
counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations
with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, although she was never a party
member. Her interests included prisoner rights; she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish
the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former director of the university's Feminist Studies department, Feminism
and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, A Vocabulary for Feminist
Praxis: On War and Radical Critique, Chapter 1, p. 24-25, AO)
And if we are feminists vigilant with respect to the vocabulary we use in thinking and implementing strategies for

democracy is also a term that requires constant

criticism, for wars are being conducted in its name, torture is justified in
its name, and democracy has become a watchword for the most
abominable violations of human rights. The official deployment of the term
democracy by the administration of US President George W. Bush has led to its
equation with torture, terror, and a wholesale denial of individual and collective rights.
The ideological strategies of the Bush administration involved the
invocation of the struggle to preserve and expand democracy as a
justification for the rapid erosion of democratic rights . Feminism is committed to a
constant criticism of these ideological processes. We now face a situation in the USA in
which torture is not recognized as torture, secret prisons are not revealed,
extraordinary rendition amounts to routine torture, and domestically there
is fencing off of the Mexican border to prevent people whose lives have
been destroyed by the impact of global capitalism from entering this
country. And, of course, the number of people in US jails and prisons continues
to rise there are now 2.2 million people behind bars which means that the United States incarcerates
proportionally more people than any other country in the world. Feminist approaches insist on
exploring the relationship between militarization and the prisonization of
our local and global landscapes. So when we say that we are dedicated to
eliminating violence against women, we cannot stop with the project of
addressing individual acts of violence committed either within intimate
relationships or by individual strangers. Violence is not only individualized
and domestic, and the perpetrators of violence are not only individual
men. We therefore place state violence, war, prison violence, torture,
capital punishment on a spectrum of violence. And while we cannot
simultaneously eliminate the entire spectrum of violence, we can always
insist on an awareness of these connections. In other words, feminism is not only
about women, nor only about gender. It is a broader methodology that can enable us to
better conceptualize and fight for progressive change. Torture , for example,
cannot be treated as an aberration, as a spectacular exception, but rather we try to
understand its links to regimes and practices associated with the
punishment of imprisonment within the domestic framework as well. Isnt
capital punishment a form of torture? What is the link between the torture at Abu Ghraib and
the routine, unquestioned torture associated with imprisonment? Why are we so quick to speak
out against these spectacular examples of torture and indeed we should
while ignoring what happens to thousands and millions of domestic
prisoners within the USA? Why do we cry out against secret prisons, when only a small fraction of the
change, we must consider that

population has ever bothered to find out what happens behind the walls of US state and federal prisons that is, if
we have not been a prisoner or relative of a prisoner ourselves? Arent maximum-security prisons secret places?

Arent womens prisons, wherever they might be located, also secret

places?

Democracy uses diversity and fluidity to disguise itself, there

hasnt been any progress
Eisenstein 08 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written
feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 27, AO)

Since September 11 2001, there has been a female face to the wars on/of
terror, but the meaning of this is not self-evident . Females assist in the orchestration of
the US wars of/on terror, and therefore women have more complicity in these wars. Yet there is nothing
more undemocratic than war, so it is highly unlikely that womens
presence can mean anything good. No ones rights especially not
womens can be met in war; or by waging war. Females, although still a minority,
are more present in militaries, as government officials, as suicide
bombers, as soldiers in Third World countries than in earlier times. There are
more women being militarized for and against imperial power . Today there
are more women at these sites of power, or what were sites of power,
fighting on behalf of the powerful, and they are more visible. This visibility
is unusual because females are more often than not out of view made
absent, silenced rather than seen. So the fact that women appear more
present needs attention. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wields
power, but not as a woman whatever this might really mean today and
not for women and their rights but for an imperial democracy that
destroys womens equality and racial justice. Imperial democracy uses
racial diversity and gender fluidity to disguise itself and females and
people of color become its decoys. Condis black skin and female body operate to cloud and
obfuscate. Imperial democracy mainstreams womens rights discourse into
foreign policy and militarizes women for imperial goals. Imperial
democracy creates women combatants both inside and outside the
military, and First Lady Laura Bush authorizes this process as civilian-in-chief. My point is not that nothing has
changed, or that these changes do not matter, but rather that these changes do not mean what
they seem to mean.

Economy
Their use of imperialism widens the gender gap in poverty.
Chew 8 (Huibin Amelia, Dr. Chew received her Ph.D in American studies and ethnicity from USC Dornsife and
is a Fulbright Scholar. Whats left? After imperial feminist hijackings, Feminism and War: Confronting US
Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, pgs 75-76)//JS

Women are disproportionately affected by the economic harms of war, as

well. Globally, women make up 70 percent of those starving or on the verge
of starvation. Imperialism helps intensify the gender gap in poverty, a
situation reflected in indicators from health to literacy. Female literacy in
Iraq plummeted disproportionately during the sanctions period as girls
were pulled from school. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, women there
were the hardest hit by unemployment, since men are preferred for the
few available jobs. Formerly 72 percent of salaried Iraqi women were
public employees, and many lost their jobs when government ministries
were dismantled (Zangana 2004). The destruction of basic infrastructure like food rationing impacts on the
indigent most including poor women, many of them widows or single heads of households. Iraqs
economic woes will stretch far into the future, under the regime of SAPs
(Structural Adjustment Programs) that industrialized nations plan to
impose on the country, under the aegis of the International Monetary
Fund, because of Iraqs sovereign debt . Feminist scholars have documented how SAPs
disproportionately harm Third World women across the globe in terms of health, education, and overwork. Likewise,
in the USA, most families in poverty are headed by single mothers, and poor women bear the brunt of public service
cuts. In Massachusetts, for example, most Medicaid recipients, graduates of state and community colleges, welfare
and subsidized childcare recipients are women and all these programs have had their budgets slashed (Naim and
Wagman 2004). The majority of public and subsidized housing recipients are female-headed households, but in
recent years Section 8 (the common name for government housing subsidy) has continued atrophying; President

In addition to wage labor, we must

consider the economics of womens unpaid work, performed in their
traditional gender roles. As hospitals are destroyed or become
unavailable, its women in both Iraq and the USA who disproportionately
shoulder responsibility for their families healthcare. Childcare,
healthcare, and homemaking all weigh more heavily upon women without
public sector aid whether due to economic collapse in occupied lands, or
budget austerity in the aggressor nation. Mass incarceration increases the
burden on women from poor, black, and immigrant communities of color,
who manage households alone even while workfare-welfare programs
keep a mostly female underclass from decent jobs. Military wives and
mothers are saddled with double duty, to enable soldiers extended tours .
George W. Bush proposes more cuts for 2008 (Wright 2005).

Environment
Their attempt to solve for [insert ecological crisis] will always
fail because they do nothing to help eliminate gender
inequality which is intrinsic to militarism and our relationship
to the environment.
Tickner 92 (J. Ann, Dr. Tickner received her Ph.D from Brandeis University and her MA from Yale University.
She works at American University as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence and is a Professor Emerita at the
University of Southern California. Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global
Security, pgs 128-129)//JS

attempts to alleviate these military, economic,

and ecological insecurities cannot be completely successful until the
hierarchal social relations, including gender relations, intrinsic to each of
these domains are recognized and substantially altered. In other words,
the achievement of peace, economic justice, and ecological sustainability
is inseparable from overcoming social relations of domination and
subordination; genuine security requires not only the absence of war but
This analysis has also suggested that

also the elimination of unjust social relations, including unequal gender

relations . If, as I have argued, the world is insecure because of these multiple
insecurities, then international relations, the discipline that analyzes
international security and prescribes measures for its alleviation, must be
reformulated. The reconceptualization of security in multidimensional and multi-level terms is beginning to
occur on the fringes of the discipline; a more comprehensive notion of security being used by peace researchers,

But
while all these contemporary revisionists have helped to move the
definition of security beyond its exclusively national security focus toward
additional concerns for the security of the individual and the natural
environment, they have rarely included gender as a category of analysis,
nor have they acknowledged similar, earlier reformulations of security
constructed by women.
critics of conventional international relations theory, environmentalists, and even some policy-makers.

Globalization
Squo globalization, and the global citizen is something that is
only accessible to men.

Tickner 14 (J. Ann,

feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in residence

at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined after fifteen
years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as president
of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female president of the
ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford University Press, A
Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 5, p. 65-66, AO)

Ohmae, a leading international business thinker, described

himself as a global citizen, a resident of his community, and Japanese, in that order. For Ohmae the term
global citizen meant a citizen of what he described as a borderless world, an
interlinked economy of one billion people where political maps indicating
boundaries between countries are being replaced by competitive maps marked
by flows of finance and industrial activity from which political boundaries have
disappeared (Ohmae 1991, 18).1 Ohmae used the analogy of the duty-free shop as a precursor to what life would be like in
this borderless world. Quoting the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu, that the best strategy in war is one
that allows you to win without having to fight, Ohmaes text reads like a military manual for business
executives. Ohmaes self-defined identity as a citizen warrior on the frontier of this
new borderless world (if frontier is the right term) did not include his gender identity. Yet, it
is fair to say that the frontier he depicted is one populated mostly by men. In her
textual analysis of The Economist, a British weekly business news magazine, Charlotte Hooper portrayed an
international corporate and financial world similar to Ohmaesa world of
Darwinian struggle rhetorically constructed around metaphors of war and sport
(Hooper 2001, 151). According to Hooper, the dominant image of globalization in the pages of The
Economist is a frontier masculinity in which capitalism meets science fiction and is moving, metaphorically
In his 1991 bestseller, The Borderless World, Kenichi

at least, toward the colonization of space (Hooper 2001, 160). Advertisements that feature images of planet earth seen from space
abound; the corporate mission is often phrased as being at the forefront of a dynamic global marketplace where only the intrepid

Globalization belongs to an elite cosmopolitan culture of men.

This story of manly conquest is not the whole story , however. Hooper, writing in 2001, also
recognized the introduction into the pages of The Economist of a more feminized
cooperative style of management, more typical of Asian business, which has the
potential to soften and feminize Western business practices . Nevertheless, Hooper
does not see this change in style as translating into advances for women in the
corporate world. Indeed, it would be fair to ask: Where are the women on these new frontiers
of globalization? Looking for women in this elite corporate world yields dismal
results. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, women comprised less than one half of
one percent of the 4,000 top executives of Fortune 500 companies (Goldstein 2001, 43).2
And when women do rise to the top, they almost always earn less than men. Even
if women are not to be found on the extraterrestrial frontiers of the globalizing
economy, they are also on the move. Women are crossing different frontiers from
countryside to city to take up jobs in the newly globalized industrial production. Indeed, industrialization in the
context of globalization is as much female-led as it is export-led. Women are not
only moving to cities, they are also moving across international borders. While, in
general, the international mobility of labor is more restricted than it was a century ago, women are moving across
international frontiers in larger numbers than ever before, as domestic servants,
sweatshop workers, mail-order brides, and sex workers . Another boundarythat between home
and workplaceis also being challenged by a growth in home-based production (Prgl 1999). These women on the
move have been described as the new proletariat of the global economy; with a
growing feminization of poverty, some see a world of gender apartheid (Shiva 1995).
Yet the picture is more complicated and the gender impact of globalization is quite variable . In the last fifty years,
women almost everywhere have been gaining in terms of legal rights, education,
job opportunities, and wages, while many men, particularly blue collar or nonwhite and especially in developed countries, have been losing in terms of wages
and bargaining power. But even in an economy where men suffer, gender bias
businessman dares to tread.

exists. Women continue to experience persistent discrimination and inequality by

virtue of being women. The United Nations Human Development Report of 1995 reported that, of the 1.3 billion people
living in poverty at that time, 70 percent were women (United Nations 1996, 36).3 Female poverty was attributed
to womens unequal situation in the labor market, their treatment under social
welfare systems, and their status in the family.

Gendered Violence
Patriarchy is the root cause of war.
Johnson 14 Allan G. Johnson Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, nationally recognized
writer, novelist, and public speaker who has worked on issues of privilege, oppression, and social inequality. The
Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy 3rd edition. Manhood and War.
http://www.agjohnson.us/essays/manhood/ {Shoell}
The second problem with using warfare to explain male aggression and patriarchal dominance is that its a circular

every nation going to

war sees itself as justified in defending what it defines as the good. Each side
argument. As much as we like to divide the world into good guys and bad guys,

believes in and glorifies the use of male-identified armed force to resolve disputes and uphold deeply held abstract
principles, from the glory of Allah to ethnic or racial purity to the sacredness of democracy. Even the most reluctant
government may welcome a breakdown of negotiations that will justify using force (unless they think theyll lose),
and it has become commonplace for national leaders to use war as a way to galvanize public support for their

The heroic male figure of western gunslinging

cowboys is almost always portrayed as basically peace-loving and
unwilling to use violence unless he has to. But the whole point of his
heroism and of the story itself is the audience wanting him to have to.
regimes, especially in election years.

The
spouses, children, territory, honor, and various underdogs who are defended with heroic violence serve as excuses
for the violent demonstration of a particular version of patriarchal manhood. They arent of central importance,

The real interest lies in the male

hero and his relation to other men as victor or vanquished, as good guy or
bad guy. Indeed, the hero is often the only one who remains intact (or
mostly so) at the end of the story. The raped wife, slaughtered family, and
ruined community get lost in the shuffle, with only passing attention to
their suffering as it echoes across generations and no mention of how they
have been used as a foil for patriarchal masculine heroism. Note, however,
that when female characters take on such heroic roles, as in Thelma and
Louise, the social response is ambivalent if not hostile. Many people complained that
which is why their experience is rarely the focus of attention.

the villains in Thelma and Louise made men look bad, but Ive never heard anyone complain that the villains in
male-heroic movies make men look bad. It seems that we have yet another gender double standard: its acceptable

To support male
aggression and therefore male dominance as societys only defense
against evil, we have to believe that evil forces exist out there, in villains,
governments, and armies. In this, we have to assume that the bad guys
actually see themselves as evil and not as heroes defending loved ones
and principles against bad guys like us. The alternative to this kind of thinking is to realize
that the same patriarchal ethos that creates our masculine heroes also creates
the violent villains they battle and prove themselves against, and that
both sides often see themselves as heroic and self-sacrificing for a worthy
cause. For all the wartime propaganda, good and bad guys play similar games and salute a core of common
values, not to mention one another on occasion. At a deep level, war and many other forms of
to portray men as villainous but only if it serves to highlight male heroism.

male aggression are manifestations of the same evil they supposedly

defend against. The evil is the patriarchal religion of control and
domination that encourages men to use coercion and violence to settle
disputes, manage human relations, and affirm masculine identity.

Women are disproportionately affected by war because IR

theorist willfully ignore the effects that policies have on
minorities.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 49 {Shoell}
Despite a widespread myth that wars are fought, mostly by men, to protect vulnerable peoplea category to
which women and children are generally assignedwomen

and children constitute a

significant proportion of casualties in recent wars. According to the United
Nations Human Development Report, there has been a sharp increase in
the proportion of civilian casualties of warfrom about 10 percent at the
beginning of the twentieth century to 90 percent at its close . Although the report
does not break down these casualties by sex, it claims that this increase makes women among
the worst sufferers, even though they constitute only 2 percent of the
worlds regular army personnel. The 1994 report of the Save the Children Fund reported that 1.5
million children were killed in wars and 4 million seriously injured by bombs and land mines between 1984 and

women should not be seen

only as victims; as civilian casualties increase, womens responsibilities
rise. However, war makes it harder for women to fulfill their reproductive and care giving tasks. For example, as
mothers, family providers, and caregivers, women are particularly penalized by economic
sanctions associated with military conflict, such as the boycott put in
place by the United Nations against Iraq after the Gulf War of 1991. In
working to overcome these difficulties, women often acquire new roles
and a greater degree of independence independence that, frequently,
they must relinquish when the conflict is terminated. Women and children
constitute about 75 percent of the number of persons of concern to the
United Nations Commission on Refugees (about 21.5 million at the beginning of 1999). This
population has increased dramatically since 1970 (when it was 3 million), mainly due
to military conflict, particularly ethnic conflicts. In these types of conflicts, men often
1994. But there is another side to the changing pattern of war, and

disappear, victims of state oppression or ethnic cleansing, or go into hiding, leaving women as the sole family
providers. Sometimes these women may find themselves on both sides of the conflict, due to marriage and

When women are forced into refugee camps, their

vulnerability increases. Distribution of resources in camps is conducted in
consultation with male leaders, and women are often left out of the
distribution process. These gender-biased processes are based on liberal
assumptions that refugee men are both the sole wage earners in families
and actors in the public sphere.49
conflicting family ties.

Patriarchal societies justify violence against women.

Lough 99 Thomas S. Kent State University Emeritus and Sonoma State University Human Ecology Forum
100 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Energy, Agriculture, Patriarchy and Ecocide1, 7064 Avenida Cala, Rohnert
Park, CA 94928 USA http://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her62/62lough1.pdf {Shoell}

Some egalitarian societies have survived for centuries (Leacock 1977, 1987), but
most have become extinguished or rendered patriarchal. When societies
become sedentary, destroy habitat, and replace it with agriculture, men take over
and women do 70-80 percent of the work (Boserup 1965, 1970, 1983, 1990a, 1990b; Tinker

1990). Women ensnared in patriarchal societies have not only been the providers of the ever-increasing
populations needed to supply the everincreasing demand for labor; women have at the same time cared and
provided for the children they bore, the men in their families and communities, and labored to produce the
surplus goods and services that stratified societies demand. In general, women have also been made available for
sex, both for procreation and for pleasure.24

In the process of destroying habitat and

subordinating women, womens prior knowledge of subsistence, nutrition,

and healing in particular habitats was also lost, even as they were often
reduced to slaves and sexual chattel in order to perpetuate inequalities of
gender, wealth, and privilege. Put more plainly, women had to be privatized in order to make it
customary and legal to invade, control, and exploit them, for profit and pleasure (Mies 1986, esp. Ch. 2). Women
bear and care for children; women heal and educate; women care about the future their children will experience.

With few exceptions, women have not waged war, and

the issue that now unites all women of the world is that of ending violence
against women, almost all of which involves rape. Yet there is no English word to
Women also abhor violence.

describe a society whose members hold womens values of life, caring, and healing. Maria Mies introduced the
word matristic to refer to such societies: Human Ecology Forum 106 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1999.
. . I use the term matristic instead of matriarchal because matriarchal implies that mothers were able to
establish a political system of dominance. But not even in matrilineal and matrilocal societies did women establish
such lasting political dominance systems (1986, 72). Most of the early gathering and present subsistence
societies (that have escaped the ravages of missionaries, state militia, and developers) are thus matristic,
although matristic must be a matter of degree. Gender egalitarian societies, accounts of which are cited above,
have generally been matristic. Four consequences of the subordination of women have been: (1) elimination of
their vernacular knowledge, skills, and relationships that enabled their communities to sustain themselves in
particular habitats over time (Boserup 1970; Shiva 1989, 1994; Editors of The Ecologist 1992; Tinker 1990); (2)
reducing womens influence over preserving their environments; (3) reducing womens control over the number
and spacing of children they bear and care for (Kolata 1974; Collier and Rosaldo 1981; Editors of The Ecologist

The
violence visited against women has been used so as to render them
submissive and seize their property. This has perhaps been more often discussed than the
1992; Leacock 1987, 29-32; Sachs 1994); and (4) the nearly universal practice of violence against women.

other topics with which I deal. In the next section I offer a brief account of the witchburnings that occurred
primarily in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries that can serve as an example of the process of
violent coercion.

Patriarchal societies justify violence against women.

Lough 99 Thomas S. Kent State University Emeritus and Sonoma State University Human Ecology Forum
100 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Energy, Agriculture, Patriarchy and Ecocide1, 7064 Avenida Cala, Rohnert
Park, CA 94928 USA http://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her62/62lough1.pdf {Shoell}

Some egalitarian societies have survived for centuries (Leacock 1977, 1987), but
most have become extinguished or rendered patriarchal. When societies
become sedentary, destroy habitat, and replace it with agriculture, men take over
and women do 70-80 percent of the work (Boserup 1965, 1970, 1983, 1990a, 1990b; Tinker
1990). Women ensnared in patriarchal societies have not only been the providers of the ever-increasing
populations needed to supply the everincreasing demand for labor; women have at the same time cared and
provided for the children they bore, the men in their families and communities, and labored to produce the
surplus goods and services that stratified societies demand. In general, women have also been made available for

In the process of destroying habitat and

subordinating women, womens prior knowledge of subsistence, nutrition,
and healing in particular habitats was also lost, even as they were often
reduced to slaves and sexual chattel in order to perpetuate inequalities of
gender, wealth, and privilege. Put more plainly, women had to be privatized in order to make it
sex, both for procreation and for pleasure.24

customary and legal to invade, control, and exploit them, for profit and pleasure (Mies 1986, esp. Ch. 2). Women
bear and care for children; women heal and educate; women care about the future their children will experience.

With few exceptions, women have not waged war, and

the issue that now unites all women of the world is that of ending violence
against women, almost all of which involves rape. Yet there is no English word to
Women also abhor violence.

describe a society whose members hold womens values of life, caring, and healing. Maria Mies introduced the
word matristic to refer to such societies: Human Ecology Forum 106 Human Ecology Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1999.
. . I use the term matristic instead of matriarchal because matriarchal implies that mothers were able to
establish a political system of dominance. But not even in matrilineal and matrilocal societies did women establish
such lasting political dominance systems (1986, 72). Most of the early gathering and present subsistence
societies (that have escaped the ravages of missionaries, state militia, and developers) are thus matristic,
although matristic must be a matter of degree. Gender egalitarian societies, accounts of which are cited above,
have generally been matristic. Four consequences of the subordination of women have been: (1) elimination of
their vernacular knowledge, skills, and relationships that enabled their communities to sustain themselves in
particular habitats over time (Boserup 1970; Shiva 1989, 1994; Editors of The Ecologist 1992; Tinker 1990); (2)
reducing womens influence over preserving their environments; (3) reducing womens control over the number

and spacing of children they bear and care for (Kolata 1974; Collier and Rosaldo 1981; Editors of The Ecologist
1992; Leacock 1987, 29-32; Sachs 1994); and (4) the nearly universal practice of violence against women.

The

violence visited against women has been used so as to render them

submissive and seize their property. This has perhaps been more often discussed than the

other topics with which I deal. In the next section I offer a brief account of the witchburnings that occurred
primarily in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries that can serve as an example of the process of
violent coercion.

Patriarchy justifies violent interventionism, turns the aff.

Johnson 14 Allan G. Johnson Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan, nationally recognized
writer, novelist, and public speaker who has worked on issues of privilege, oppression, and social inequality. The
Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy 3rd edition. Manhood and War.
http://www.agjohnson.us/essays/manhood/ {Shoell}
A key defense of patriarchy invokes the mysteries of warfare as crucial to understanding the natural gender order.
As the argument goes, men must be aggressive and develop a capacity for violence in order to defend society and
family. As Sam Keen puts it in his book, Fire in the Belly, sacrifice is at the center of mens lives as they put the
welfare of others above their own: Most men went to war, shed blood, and sacrificed their lives with the conviction
that it was the only way to defend those whom they loved. . . . [S]hort of a utopian world . . . someone must be

The violent-man-as-protector image

is connected to patriarchy through the idea that mens capacity for
violence and aggression inevitably leads to male dominance over women,
children, and property, since men must be more powerful than those they
protect. Men . . . must be manly, anthropologist David Gilmore tells us in Manhood in the Making, because
prepared to take up arms and do battle with evil (p. 47).

warfare demands it (p.150). But it is no less reasonable to also argue that warfare exists because patriarchal
manliness and its related structures of control and dominance demand it. There are two major problems with using
warfare to justify patriarchy and male dominance. First,

the romantic images of warfare dont

fit much of what we know about actual men and war. The idea that men are motivated
primarily by self-sacrifice doesnt square with the high value patriarchal cultures place on male autonomy and
freedom. According to Keen, autonomy and independence, not self-sacrifice for women and children, were a key to
the patriarchal rebellion against goddess religions and mens servitude to nature. The warfare argument for
patriarchy also fits poorly with the reality of warfare as most people actually experience it. I dont know which wars
Keen has in mind, but most that I can think of were fought for anything but defense of loved ones, and men in
privileged racial and economic classes who presumably love their families as much as the next man have been all

Was it love that motivated

the endless bloodshed of the Roman conquests, the slaughter of countless
religious wars and crusades, the Napoleonic wars, the U.S. Civil War, or
the two world wars? Was it to protect women and children that the United
States liberated the Philippines from the Spanish following the SpanishAmerican war and then brutally suppressed Philippine resistance to
becoming a U.S. colony and gateway to Asian markets? Was it for the sake
of hearth and home that U.S. soldiers went to Korea, Vietnam, Grenada,
Panama, and Iraq, or Soviet troops to Afghanistan? Does love of family
explain the ethnic slaughter in Eastern Europe and the brutality of civil
wars from Cambodia to Somalia to El Salvador? Is the collective emotional
rush that typically greets declarations of war and the itchy yen for
glorious victory simply a joyous welcome for yet another opportunity for
men to demonstrate their love for wife, children, and community and the
fulfillment of their duty to protect? It would seem not. Closer to the truth is that
war allows men to reaffirm their masculine standing in relation to other
men, to act out patriarchal ideals of physical courage and aggression, and
to avoid being shamed and ridiculed by other men for refusing to join in
the fight. As Keen himself tells us, war is a heroic way for an individual to make a name for himself and to
too willing to allow those less fortunate than they to serve in their place.

practice heroic virtues. It is an opportunity for men to bond with other men, friend and foe alike, and to reaffirm
their common masculine warrior codes. If war was simply about self-sacrifice in the face of monstrous enemies who
threaten mens loved ones, how do we make sense of the long tradition of respect between wartime enemies, the
codes of honor that bind them together even as they bomb and devastate civilian populations that consist
primarily of women and children? Could soldiers fighting only out of such lofty motives as love for home and hearth
accumulate such an extensive and consistent record of gratuitous rape and other forms of torture, abuse, and

wanton violence inflicted on civilian populations? Certainly there are men who refuse to go to war, and others who
go with the sense of self-sacrificing mission that Keen describes, but to attribute warfare as a system to such
altruistic motives is the kind of romantic thinking that warfare thrives on. In spite of the horrible price that many
men pay for their participation in war, we shouldnt confuse the fact of their being sacrificed with self-sacrificing
personal motivations, especially when trying to explain why warfare exists as a social phenomenon.

Heg
Their fear of heg decline is rooted in masculinist ideals
spouted by the US military in order to maintain violent
dominance
Tickner 14 (J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 3, p. 48-50, AO)
The intellectual roots of the nationalist approach date back to the mercantilist school of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-

The contemporary version of

nationalism, associated with the realist school of international relations , discussed in
more detail in Chapter 1, became popular in the United States in the 1970s at the same
time as its proponents became concerned with what they perceived as US
century Europethe period coincidental with the rise of the nation-state.

hegemonic decline (Gilpin 1987; Krasner 1982). The nationalist approach takes the state
and its behavior in the international system as its basic unit of analysis. All
nationalists ascribe to the primacy of the state, of national security, and of
military power in the organization and functioning of the international system (Gilpin
1987, 31). Nationalism in orthodox IPE emerged as a critique of liberalism, but its
explanation of state behavior is quite close to liberals explanation of the
behavior of rational economic man. States are assumed to be behaving as rational
profit maximizers pursuing wealth, power, and autonomy in an anarchic international system
devoid of any sense of community. In a conflictual world, states are striving to be economically self-sufficient.
Their participation in the world economy is an attempt to create an international
division of labor and resource allocation favorable to their own interests and
those of groups within their national boundaries. Arguments against extensive
economic interdependence are justified in the name of national security. Strategic
domestic industries are to be given protection, especially when they produce military-related goods. National security
and national interest are, therefore, the overriding goals of policy (Gill and Law 1988, 367).
A feminist critique of the nationalist approach must begin by asking whether the
state, the central unit of analysis, is a gendered construct with respect to both its
historical origins and its contemporary manifestations. In spite of advances in the
legal rights of women in many states, none of the known forms of state politicizes
womens roles in such a way as to give them de facto equality with men (Moore 1988,
150). In all states, institutions of state power are dominated by men, particularly in
the realm of foreign policy and the military. Because most foreign-policymakers
and theorists who have explained the origins of states and state behavior in the
international arena have been men, we might assume that this could influence
not only the behavior of states and the prioritizing of certain statist goals, such
as power and autonomy, but also the theoretical explanations of that behavior.
We might also assume that prescriptions for maximizing state power might work
more to the advantage of men than women.

The consolidation of the modern state system and the rise

of modern science, from which the Western social sciences trace their origins, both occurred in the seventeenth century, a time of
dramatic social, economic, and political upheaval well documented in Western history. Less well documented is the fact that the
seventeenth century is also associated with the intellectual origins of Western feminism. According to Juliet Mitchell, this is not

women in the seventeenth century saw themselves as a distinct

sociological group completely excluded from the new society rising out of the
medieval order (Mitchell 1987, 31). Seventeenth-century feminists, such as Mary Astell, lamented that the new spirit of
equality did not apply to women. In the seventeenth century, concepts of gender were shifting;
coincidentally with the expansion of markets, definitions of male and female were
becoming polarized in ways that were suited to the growing division between
work and home required by early capitalism. The notion of housewife began to
place womens work in the private domestic sphere, as opposed to the public
coincidental;

world of the state and the market occupied by men . The needs of early industrial
capitalism stimulated this growing division of labor between home and workplace
that began the process by which the economic, political, and social options
available to women were severely curtailed (Keller 1985, 61). Although these new
economic arrangements were synonymous with the birth of the Enlightenment,
female became associated with what Enlightenment knowledge had left behind.
The persecution of witches, who were defending the female crafts and medical
skills of a pre-capitalist era against a growing male professionalism, reached new
heights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . Jean Bodin (15301596), a French mercantilist
and founder of the quantitative theory of money as well as the modern concept of national sovereignty, was one of the most vocal
proponents of the persecution of witches. According to Bodins mercantilist philosophy, the modern state must be invested with
absolute sovereignty for the development of new wealth necessary for war-fighting; to this end the state needs more workers and
thus must eliminate witches held responsible for abortion and other forms of birth control (Mies 1986, 83). Sovereignty and
rationality were part of an Enlightenment epistemology, committed to the discovery of universal objective or scientific lawsan

notions such as
objectivity and rationality, central to the definition of the modern natural and
social sciences in the West, have typically been associated with masculine
thinking. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the economy was placed in the
public domain of men and of rational scientific knowledge. The nationalist approach, particularly
epistemology bent on discrediting superstition, often portrayed as old wives tales. As mentioned earlier,

its contemporary neo-realist version, has taken the liberal concept of rational economic man, which grew out of this Enlightenment

Using game theoretic

models, such explanations of states behavior draw on the instrumentally rational
market behavior of individuals. Because international economic interactions
rarely result in winner-take-all situations, neo-realists have focused on Prisoners
Dilemma games to explain states behavior in the international system. Where
international cooperation is seen to exist, it is explained not in terms of
international community but rather in terms of enlightened self-interest in an
environment that is essentially anarchic (Axelrod 1984; Keohane 1984, 6784). Using game
theoretic models to explain states behavior in the international system,
nationalists portray states as unitary actors: concentrating at the interstate level,
nationalists do not generally focus their attention on the internal distribution of
gains. But, if , as I have argued, women have been peripheral to the institutions of state
power and are less rewarded economically than men, the validity of the unitary
actor assumption should be examined from the perspective of gender. If, as I have
shown, women tend to be clustered at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, we
must question whether women are gaining equally to men from nationalist
prescriptions to pursue wealth and power.
knowledge, and used it to explain the behavior of states in the international system (Waltz 1979).

Imperialism
The aff fails to confront IRs roots of imperialism - preventing
their method from having a truly international
understanding of the world.
Tickner 2014 (J. Ann, Dr. Tickner received her Ph.D from Brandeis University and her MA from Yale
University. She works at American University as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence and is a Professor Emerita at
the University of Southern California. A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Oxford University Press,
pgs 107-108)//JS
As Halperin reminds us, missing from this story is Europes brutal expansion that began in 1492 with the so-called

Although IR has focused on relations between the great

powers in a world of nation-states, it is European colonization and
imperialism that have shaped the present and future of more than twothirds of the worlds population. Curiously missing, both from the progressive Eurocentric
voyages of discovery.

Westphalian narrative and from the contemporary discipline that describes and analyzes it, are issues of
imperialism and race, subjects which were of vital concern to IR scholars at the disciplines founding moments in

A discipline that claims to be international, of relevance

to all peoples and states, traces its modern origins to a time at which
imperialism was at its height: yet most recent surveys of IR have little to
say about the history of four hundred years of European colonization or of
decolonization, one of the most important processes of the twentieth century (Gruffydd Jones 2006, 2).
Any attempt to construct a global IR must recognize this historical legacy
the early twentieth century.

of imperialism.

In their revisionist account of the early discipline, David Long and Brian Schmidt claim that

it was the dynamic interaction between imperialism and internationalism, not the realist/idealist debate, which
initially drove IR theory during its founding moments (Long and Schmidt 2005, 1). Many of the IR texts of the early

Robert Vitalis
claims that white supremacy had a central place in the origins and
development of IR (Vitalis 2005, 161). The first IR journal in the United States, founded in 1910, was
twentieth century evidenced a preoccupation with the administration of the empire. Relatedly,

called the Journal of Race Development; later, in 1922, it became Foreign Affairs, the official journal of the Council
on Foreign Relations. The lead article of the first issue made the case for a research agenda focused on the progress
of backward races and states. As the journals original title makes clear, in 1910, boundaries that were drawn
between what is inside and outside the national space were not so much a territorial question as a biological one.
An imperialist world order produced administrative problems for the colonizers that begged for scientific study and
solutions an important motivator for the young discipline of international relations (Vitalis 2005, 171). In other
words, the importance of scientific study of global issues was recognized well before postWorld War II realism.
Indeed, postcolonial historians and philosophers of science have long recognized the intimate relationship between

Geographer John Willinsky (1998, 27) has

linked the way we construct modern knowledge to European imperialism.
He claims that five centuries of learning , although generally helpful for humankind, have
divided knowledge in certain ways that give certain people agency and
authorship while denying them to others. The Cartesian revolution of the seventeenth
Western science and the imperial project (Harding 1998).

century shifted knowledge based on resemblances to knowledge based on differencesuch as the differences
between mind and body, men and women, West and East, and colonizers and colonized. Studying, classifying, and
ordering humanity within an imperial context gave rise to peculiar and powerful ideas about race, culture, and
nation that were conceptual instruments that the West used to divide up and to educate the world (Willinsky 1998,
3).

Willinsky argues that the lessons that were drawn from centuries of

European expansion continue to influence, even if subconsciously, how

we see and interpret the world today . While Willinsky is not engaging specifically with IR,
evidence of these differences can be seen in West-centric modernization stories, clashes of civilizations, and

Branwen Gruffydd Jones, in

claims that a discipline
rooted in European history and classical thought and largely written by
and about Americans and Europeans, has forgotten its imperial roots. Echoing
Willinsky, she suggests that the way to a more truly international
gendered and racial assumptions about who are the creators of knowledge.
the introduction to her edited text Decolonizing International Relations,

understanding of the world is to confront the colonial heritage that

modern IR has failed to shed (Gruffydd Jones 2006, 6). Gruffydd Jones does not
believe that this can be accomplished by simply applying existing IR
knowledge to the rest of the world or by Eurocentric critics: the
dispossessed must tell their own history. Authors in the volume consider the question as to
how best to puncture the myth of Europe and produce knowledge that is both of and about the international. Too
frequently, critical voices are still speaking out of Western knowledge
traditions.

Irrational Actors
Gender is a legitimator of war, countries too scared to appear
feminized to the international community
Tickner 14 (J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished
scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington
DC, which she recently joined after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at
the University of Southern California. Tickner served as president of the International Studies
Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female president of the ISA,
she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 9, p. 114-116,
AO)
Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, in the United States, gendered images
were everywhere, many of them threatening. Osama bin Laden taunted the West
for becoming feminized; Francis Fukuyama was concerned about it, too. In a 1998 article in
Foreign Affairs, Fukuyama, although more positive than bin Laden about what they both saw as the feminization of Western culture,
pointed to similar dangers.

He counseled against putting women in charge of US foreign

policy and the military because of their inability to stand up to unspecified
dangers (perhaps more specific since 9/11) from those [non-democratic] parts of the world run by
young, ambitious, unconstrained men, (Fukuyama 1998, 36, 38). Five years earlier, Samuel Huntington
(1993) warned of a clash of civilizations, an only slightly veiled reference to a demographically exploding Islam, a fault line
between Western Christian societies that have progressed in terms of economic development and democratization, and the Muslim

For others the danger

was closer to home; the real fault lines were here in the United States . In a 1994
world where young mens frustrations are fueled by the failure of these same phenomena.5

article that lauded Huntingtons clash of civilizations thesis, James Kurth focused attention on the real clash, an internal one.
Extolling the rise of Western civilization and the Enlightenment, a secular society based on individualism, liberalism,
constitutionalism, human rights, the rule of law, free markets, and the separation of church and state, which came of age at the
beginning of the twentieth century, Kurth saw the Enlightenment in decline at the centurys end. What he termed
postindustrialism

has moved women into the labor market and out of the home
with negative consequences for children, particularly those reared in split family
or single-parent households. The United States was , according to Kurth, threatened not
only by feminism, which bears the responsibility for the liberation of women, but
also by multiculturalismthe presence, and recognition, of large numbers of
African Americans, Latino Americans, and Asian Americans who, unlike earlier
immigrant populations, remain unassimilated in terms of Western liberal ideas
(Kurth 1994, 14).6 The fears of these scholars, and Fukuyamas solutionto keep strong
men in chargeseemed more real in the aftermath of 9/11 than when they were
first articulated. Post9/11 discourse produced some strange bedfellows. As bin Laden goaded America
for its moral decadency and lack of manliness, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson
blamed 9/11 on the ACLU, homosexuals, and feminists because they make God
mad (Scheer 2001a). The terrorists were those unconstrained young men, some of whom
managed to live among us rather than out there beyond the fault line . So, contra bin
Laden, masculinity was back in vogue in the United States . Writing in 2002, Peggy Noonan
proclaimed that, since 9/11, the male hero has been a predominant cultural image,
presenting a beefy front of strength to a nation seeking steadiness and emotional
grounding. They are the new John Waynes men who charge up the stairs in a
hundred pounds of gear, and tell everyone else where to go to be safe .7 In spite
of the Bush administrations appointment of the first female national security
adviser, TV screens after 9/11 were full of (mostly white) men in charge, briefing
us about Americas New War both at home and abroad. We felt safer when our
men were protecting us (against other men) and our way of life. So where did all
the women go? According to an analysis by the British newspaper The Guardian, women virtually disappeared from
newspaper pages and TV screens after 9/11.8 Carol Gilligan noted that mens rising star all but eclipsed
that of the many heroic women who rose to the occasion, as firefighters or police
officers.9 Women were also among the combat forces deployed in Afghanistan
where male warriors waving guns and shouting death to America looked
menacing and unrestrained. If we did see women, they were likely to be faceless

Afghan women in the now familiar blue burqa. Their shadowy and passive
presence seemed only to reinforce these gendered images I have drawn.10 Yet the picture was
more complicated. Bin Laden taunted the West for its feminization, but he also railed
against its crusaders, an image more likely to invoke medieval knights on
horseback than the modern-day feminized men about whom Fukuyama, as well
as bin Laden, was concerned. And the masculinity of bin Ladens own foot soldiers
also came under scrutiny. Mohamed Atta, whose last will and testament banned women from his grave lest they
pollute it, was a polite shy boy who came of age in an Egypt torn between growing Western influence and the religious
fundamentalism that gathered force in reaction, [he] had two sisters headed for careers as a professor and a doctor. Grumbling
that his wife was raising him as a girl, his father is reputed to have told him [Atta] I needed to hear the word doctor in front of his
name. We told him your sisters are doctors and you are the man of the family.11 And, contra Fukuyamas and Kurths fears

American women supported the war effort in

overwhelming numbers while Afghan women beneath the burqa protested
American bombing and exhorted their sisters to fight against gender oppression .
about the feminized weakening of America,

The US Catholic bishops gave qualified support to the war on the grounds that it was a just war (Cooperman, 2001), while realist
John Mearsheimer (2001) counseled against it. Liberals, such as Laurence Tribe, condoned the use of military tribunals and the
detention of more than 1,200 young men, none of whom (as of December 2001) had been charged in connection with the attacks.12
So, if the story was not a simple one where gender and other ideological lines were firmly drawn, what can a feminist analysis add to
our understanding of 9/11 and its aftermath? The statements with which I begin this chapter offer support for the claim that war

The conduct of war is a

largely male activity on both sides but Meena, the founder of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA), exhorted women to fight, too. Nevertheless, gender is a powerful
both reinforces gender stereotypes and shakes up gender expectations (Goldstein, 2002).

legitimator of war and national security; our acceptance of a re-masculinized

society during times of war and uncertainty rises considerably. And the power of
gendered expectations and identifications have real consequences for women and
for menconsequences that are frequently ignored by conventional accounts of
war and civilizational clashes.

Liberalism
The 1acs focus on liberalism for a successful method for solving
issues is one which necessarily excludes women

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 3, p. 46-47, AO)

of liberalism, the dominant view in Western international

political economy. Although its proponents present it as a scientific theory with
universal and timeless applications, liberalism, which arose together with modern
capitalism in the eighteenth century, has generally been the ideology preferred
by theorists from rich and powerful states. Liberal theory takes the individual as the
basic unit of analysis. According to liberals, human beings are by nature economic
animals driven by rational self-interest. They assume that rational economic man
is motivated by the laws of profit maximization. He is highly individualistic,
pursuing his own economic goals in the market without any social obligation to
the community of which he is a part. Liberals believe that this instrumentally rational market behavior, even
though it is driven by selfish profit motives, produces outcomes that are efficient
or beneficial for everyone, even though they acknowledge that not everyone will
benefit to the same extent. The detrimental effects of economic growth and
market behavior, such as dwindling resources and environmental damage, are
generally not considered. A feminist critique of liberalism should begin with an
examination of rational economic man, a construct that, although it extrapolates from roles
and behaviors associated with Western men and assumes characteristics that I have
described as masculine, has been used by liberal economics to represent the
behavior of humanity as a whole. Nancy Hartsock, a feminist theorist who comes out of the Marxist
tradition, suggests that rational economic man, appearing coincidentally with the
birth of modem capitalism, is a social construct based on the reduction of a
variety of human passions to a desire for economic gain (Hartsock 1983, 47). For Hartsock, as well
as other non-liberal feminists, the highly individualistic, competitive market behavior of
rational economic man could not be assumed as a norm if womens experiences
were taken as the prototype for human behavior. Women in their reproductive and
maternal roles do not conform to the behavior of individual instrumental
rationality. Much of womens work in the provision of basic needs takes place
outside the market, in households or in the subsistence sector, prevalent in agrarian economies. When women
enter the market economy, they are disproportionately represented in the caring
professions as teachers, nurses, or social workerschoices that are generally not made on the basis
of profit maximization but on the basis of values that are emphasized in female
socialization. If this is the case, we must conclude that most womens, as well as some
mens, motivations and behavior cannot be explained using this model of
rationality. Rational economic man is extrapolated from assumptions about
human nature that have their origins in Western liberal political theory. Rational
economic man is a Hobbesian man whose passions have been tamed by the rational
pursuit of profit. Liberal contract theories about mens origins depict a state of nature where
individuals existed prior to and apart from the community; they came together
not out of any desire for community but out of the need for a protected
environment in which they could conduct their economic transactions more
securely. Hartsock argues that, given its dependence solely on economic exchange, any
notion of community in liberal theory is fragile and instrumental. She claims, however, that
I begin with a feminist critique

this liberal assumption that the behavior of individuals can be explained apart from society is unrealistic because individuals have
always inhabited and been a part of society (Hartsock 1983).

Even though early liberal theorists were

explicit in their assertion that their theories about human behavior applied to the

behavior of men and not women, this distinction has since been lost as
contemporary liberals assume this type of behavior for humanity as a whole.
Feminists take issue with this theory of human behavior, claiming that it is
biased toward a masculine representation. Feminist philosopher Sandra Harding claims that
for women, the self is defined through relationship with others, rather than apart
from others (Harding 1986). Alison Jaggar argues that liberalisms individualistic portrayal of
human nature has placed excessive value on the mind at the expense of the body .
Because, in our sexual division of labor, men have dominated the intellectual fields
whereas women have been assigned the tasks necessary for physical survival , Jaggar
concludes that given this sexual division of labor, women would be unlikely to develop a
theory of human nature that ignored human interdependence or to formulate a
conception of rationality that stressed individual autonomy. If the need for interdependence
were taken as the starting point, community and cooperation would not be seen as puzzling and problematic (Jaggar 1983, 4048).
Generalizing from rational economic man to the world economy, liberals believe that world welfare is maximized by allowing market
forces to operate unimpeded and goods and investment to flow as freely as possible across national boundaries according to the

Critics of liberalism question this liberal belief in openness and interdependence, claiming that it
challenge the notion of
mutual gains from exchange by focusing on the unequal distribution of gains
across states, classes, and factors of production, arguing that gains accrue
disproportionately to the most powerful states or economic actors . For example, Marxist
laws of comparative advantage.

falsely depoliticizes exchange relationships and masks hidden power structures. They

critics argue that liberal economic theory obscures the unequal power relations between capital and labor. Because capital is mobile
across interstate boundaries and controls strategic decisions about investment and production, it is being rewarded
disproportionately to labor, a trend that took off in the 1980s when labor was becoming increasingly marginalized in matters of
economic policy, a trend that is still very much in evidence today (Gill and Law 1988, 364).

Marx
Marxism ignores the role of womens labor in the homethe
aff can never account for issues of gender
Tickner 14 (J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 3, p. 47-48, AO)

If capital is being rewarded disproportionately to labor in the world economy,

then men are being rewarded disproportionately to women. Much of womens
work is performed outside the formal economy, but even when they enter the
market economy, women are not being rewarded to the same extent as men;
earning lower wages and owning an insignificant proportion of the worlds capital
puts women at an enormous disadvantage in terms of power and wealth. This
problem has been examined in some detail in studies of Third World women and development. The UN
Decade for the Advancement of Women (19751985) assumed that womens problems
in the Third World were related to insufficient participation in the process of
modernization and development. But later studies of women and development
suggested that, in many parts of the Third World, the position of rural women
may actually decline as they become assimilated into a global market economy
and that development aid can actually reduce the status of women relative to
men. It is often the case that womens access to land and technology decreases as land
reform is instituted and agriculture is modernized. Land reform, traditionally
thought to be a vital prerequisite for raising agricultural productivity, often
reduces womens control over traditional use rights and gives titles to male heads
of households. Agricultural mechanization has also reduced womens control over
agricultural production as men take over the mechanized part of the production
process. The modernization of agriculture, which often leads to a dualism in
agricultural production, tends to leave women behind in the traditional sector (Sen
and Grown, 1987). Liberals have generally supported export-led strategies of development. But, because states that
have opted for export-led strategies have often experienced increased income
inequalities and because women are disproportionately clustered at the bottom of
the economic scale, such strategies may have a negative effect on women . The harsh
effects of structural adjustment policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) fall disproportionately on women as

When government
subsidies or funds are no longer available, women in their roles as unpaid
homemakers and care providers must often take up the provision of these basic
welfare needs. Studies of Third World development and its effects on women have
documented evidence that demonstrates that liberal strategies to promote
economic growth and improve world welfare may have a differential impact on
men and women. Because womens work more generally often takes place outside
the market economy, a model based on instrumentally rational market behavior
does not capture all the economic activities of women. Nor can we assume that
prescriptions generated by such a model will be as beneficial to women as they
are to men.
providers of basic needs as social welfare programs in areas of health, nutrition, and housing are cut.

Marxists ignore womens familial roles in labor analysis, not

accessible

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 3, p. 50-51, AO)

Unlike the liberal and nationalist approaches, which center on explaining the behavior of, and prescribing for, the interests of

the contemporary Marxist approach to international political

economy comes out of a perspective of the weak and powerless in the world
economy. Writers in the dependency and world systems schoolsMarxist approaches that gained some recognition
in the West in the 1970sargued that the world economy operates, through trade and
investment, in a way that distorts the economies of underdeveloped states in the
Third World and condemns them to permanent marginalization. Their
participation in the world capitalist economy was seen as detrimental to their
development and as exacerbating domestic inequalities between the rich and
poor (Gill and Law 1988, 5469). Concepts of core and periphery, which exist both in the world economy and within the domestic
economies of states themselves, were used to explain these inequalities: class alliances between capitalists
in the Third World and transnational capital contribute to the further
marginalization of Third World peripheries (Chase-Dunn 1982; Galtung 1971). Therefore, according
to Marxists, both the domestic and international political and economic relations
of Third World capitalist states are embedded in exploitative structures of a
capitalist world economy. Authentic, autonomous development that satisfies the needs of all people can be achieved
advanced capitalist states,

only by a socialist revolution and by delinking from the world economy.2 Because it speaks for the interests of the least powerful in
the international system,

Marxist theory would appear to be more compatible with a

feminist perspective. In fact, feminist theory owes a strong intellectual debt to Marxism. Like Marxists, radical, socialist,
and postmodern feminists see knowledge as historically and socially constructed. Marxists and feminists would agree that
knowledge is embedded in human activity. Like much of feminist theory, Marxism rejects the notion of a universal and abstract
rationality and objectivity upon which both the liberal and nationalist approaches are built. Class analysis has parallels with gender
analysis. However,

feminists criticize Marxists for ignoring womens role in the family

and also for ignoring the particular problems faced by women when they enter
the labor market that are attributable to their sex . As discussed in the previous chapters, women
do not have the same opportunities as men when they enter the workforce. Even
in the United States, where considerable advances have been made in the economic
position of women, full-time working women in 1987 earned an average of 71
percent of the earnings of full-time working men3 (Okin 1989, 144). Women frequently
experience harassment and intimidation in the workplace, and taking time off for
bearing and raising children may impede opportunities for promotion. In many
other parts of the world, the position of working women is more critical . As discussed in
Chapter 2, multinational corporations in the Third World prefer to hire young women
because they are willing to work for low wages and are more docile than men and
therefore easier to control. Feminists are most critical, however, of Marxisms
tendency to ignore women in their reproductive roles. For classical Marxists, procreation
was seen as a natural female process fixed by human biology. Therefore a division
of labor, whereby women are primarily responsible for the rearing of children, was
also seen as relatively fixed (Jaggar 1983, 75). Because Marxism assumed that womens
roles as caretakers of children was natural, an assumption questioned by many
feminists, classical Marxism omitted womens roles in the family from its analysis.
Feminists argue that ignoring women in their reproductive and childrearing roles, an
omission common to all approaches to political economy, leaves all the unpaid
labor that women perform in the family outside economic analysis. By ignoring
women in their domestic roles, Marxists and non-Marxists alike neglect certain
issues that are peculiar to women, regardless of their class position . In most cases,
when married women move into the labor force, they continue to be responsible
for most of the housework and childrearing (Okin 1989, 153). Besides the lack of respect
for unpaid housework and the dependence of full-time housewives on the income of their husbands, women, including those in
the workforce, usually suffer a severe decline in income should their marriage end in
divorce. Economic dependence may force women to stay in marriages in spite of
violent and abusive treatment. Marxist theory has paid insufficient attention to
womens private roles in households, and feminist writers also claim that contemporary Marxist analyses do
not adequately deal with the position of marginalized women in the Third World. Although they often play a crucial role in

increasingly women in the Third World are being defined as

dependents (Mies 1986, 115). Although dependency theory recognizes this type of
marginalization as a structural consequence of capitalist development, it does not
acknowledge the special position of women among the marginalized nor the fact
subsistence production,

that the status of women relative to men has been declining in many parts of the
Third World.

Marx stuff about womens unpaid labor

Tickner 14 (J. Ann,

feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in residence

at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined after fifteen
years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as president
of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female president of the
ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford University Press, A
Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter, p. 66-68, AO) (exampleunpaid U.S. maternity leave)

mainstream accounts of
globalization emphasize technical and abstract economic dynamics and proceed
as if they were gender neutral when they are not. These accounts operate
according to what she termed a narrative of eviction because they exclude an entire
range of workers, firms, and sectors that do not fit the prevalent masculinized
images of globalization such as the one I described in the introduction to this chapter (Sassen 1998, 82). Even
though the number of women in top-level global economic activities is growing, it
is a world that is male gendered in that its cultural properties and power
dynamics have historically been associated with powerful men. Certainly, there are
legal and economic barriers to womens integration into the global workforce and
the global economy. Nevertheless, legal and economic barriers are not the only
explanations for the disproportionate number of women in marginal, underrewarded economic activities. In order to understand these gendered boundaries
of economic activity, it is necessary to examine the social construction of gender
hierarchies that have the effect of assigning women disproportionately to the
margins of the global economy. Gender hierarchies directly affect specific
womens economic situation; they also construct social structures in which women in general are disadvantaged. In
In her 1998 book, Globalization and Its Discontents, Saskia Sassen claimed that

Chapter 3, I described the gendered division of labor that had its origins in seventeenth-century Europe and involved the division

it was not until the end of the eighteenth

century that the concept of family became popular; at that time it had distinctly
class connotations in that only those with property could afford to have a family
(meaning a non-working wife). Nevertheless, the concepts of male breadwinner and female
housewife, which spread throughout the world through colonization, have
affected women worldwide in terms of their classification as workers, welfare
recipients, and refugees (Mies 1986, 104110: see also Mohanty 2003, 150). Divisions between
public and private marginalize those who are associated with private
places like the home, a gender bias that Gillian Youngs has called a patriarchal prism
through which womens identities and roles are perceived as being associated
with the devalued private sphere, even after women move into the public space of
the market (Youngs 2000, 4546). Even though, today, the majority of women work outside the
home, the association of women with female gendered roles, such as housewife,
caregiver, and mother, has become institutionalized and even naturalized,
decreasing womens economic security and autonomy. Indeed, the modern global
economy could not operate without these traditional ideas about appropriate
gender roles, which result in women assuming much of the unpaid reproductive
and caring labor. Because of these historically and culturally determined gender
expectations, when women do enter the workforce, they are disproportionately
represented in the caring professions or in light manufacturing industries,
occupations that are chosen, not on the basis of market rationality, but because of values that are
emphasized in female socialization. Societies stereotypes about who women
are affect which jobs they take, and how they are compensated for their labor . In
many cases, when women do move into the waged sector they provide an optimal
labor force because, since they are defined as housewives rather than workers,
they can be paid lower wages on the assumption that their wages are
supplemental to their familys income. In many places, companies favor hiring young
unmarried women who can achieve a high level of productivity at a low wage;
these women are frequently fired if they get married or become pregnant. Long hours,
between work and home required by early capitalism. In Europe,

extremely strict supervision of work, and long travel time have often been the norm in many export industriesoften worse in small

expectations associated with traditional

gender roles there is a belief that women possess nimble fingers, have patience
for tedious jobs, and sew naturally; thus, this kind of work is not seen as skilled
and is remunerated accordingly (Enloe 1990, 162). Characterizing women as
supplemental wage earners belies the fact that at least 20 percent of all
households worldwide are headed by women (Seager 2003, 21). There is also evidence to
suggest that, in many middle-income countries, demand for womens labor has
been weakening as production becomes more skilled and capital-intensive . This
suggests that female gains in employment in global industries may be short-lived. Indeed, it has usually been the case that as
jobs become more skilled and wages improve, women have tended to lose or be
excluded from them. In Mexico, for example, the majority of factory jobs for women
are in the Maquiladoras, or twin plants to American industries that operate at a
lower cost in Mexico. Many of these jobs are low paying and detrimental to the personal health, physical safety, and
local firms than in multinational corporations. And, because of

social viability of women (Ver Beek 2001).

Traditional analysis of labor doesnt include the work women are

responsible for in the private sphere, not a full analysis.

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 5, p. 68, AO)

Gender consequences enter into another global labor issuethat of part-time and
home-based work. As companies have moved to a more flexible labor force in
all parts of the world, cost containment strategies have resulted in increased use
of part-time and/or home-based workers who are easily hired and fired. Exempt
from any national labor standards that may exist, domesticated workers are
outside the working class and its regulations and are not paid when there is no
work. They have no contracts and few rights. Home-based work is proliferating ,
especially in the developing world. Since women, often of necessity, prefer work that more easily
accommodates to family responsibilities, the vast majority of home-based
workers are women. Traditional notions of the division of labor that define women
as housewivesa category associated with the expectation that labor is free
legitimizes wages at below subsistence levels. Home-workers generally have no
networks or other organizational basis for bargaining for improved conditions and
higher wages. In an era when global cities, the newest challengers to traditional international boundaries,
have become strategic sites for the coordination of global economic processe s,
Saskia Sassen claims that women and immigrants serve as the systemic equivalent of what
she calls an offshore proletariat (Sassen 1998, 86). She sees the global labor system as
one in which women and immigrants lose in terms of jobs, wages, and stability.
Many of the jobs in leading services, dominated by finance, are, in actual fact, low paying and
manual. Increasingly, immigrant women are filling these low-paying jobs and are also serving as domestic workers for wealthy
urban elites, including elite women (Sassen 1998, 88). Even in cases where women do benefit from
entry into the workforce, they continue to perform most of the unremunerated
household labor associated with reproductive and caregiving tasks . Although there is
a sense that women are not working when they engage in this type of labor,
they are actually playing a crucial role in the reproduction of labor necessary for
waged work; moreover, these activities often constrain womens opportunities for
paid work. Although housework is not seen as work when women do it in their
own homes, without household maintenance, neither men nor women could work
outside the home. The difficulties of household tasks increase substantially in bad economic times; this is evident in the
effects of financial crises and structural adjustment policies on women.

Media
Media fuels militarism, our focus on the image of violence as
an isolated one strips us of our agency
Davis 08 (Angela Y., American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a prominent
counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations
with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, although she was never a party
member. Her interests included prisoner rights; she founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish
the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, and a former director of the university's Feminist Studies department, Feminism
and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, A Vocabulary for Feminist
Praxis: On War and Radical Critique, Chapter 1, p. 22-24, AO)
Let me return to my earlier reflections on My Lai and Haditha as a way of engaging with the ways in which the

It
cannot be denied that the widespread circulation of photographs of the
My Lai massacre, during the Vietnam War era, played a role in crystallizing
opposition to the war. But it was certainly not the case that the photographs
by themselves mobilized millions of people. The mistaken assumption that
the mere existence of visual evidence of war atrocities elicited the antiwar sentiment that ended the Vietnam War leads people to ask today why a similar response
was not generated by the images of the war in Iraq. It is true that the embeddedness of war
journalism has restricted what we see and hear and read about Iraq . Yet we
have seen horrendous images of torture. There were the accidental images of torture in the
Abu Ghraib prison that were never meant to be publicly released. If photographs by themselves
were able to spur people to action, long ago we should have been in the
street by the millions twenty-four hours a day. Even though we have not
seen the worst images. Even though we have yet to see images of women who were
detained and interrogated in Abu Ghraib. Even though we have not seen and
have to imagine the conditions of prisoners who have been subject to
extraordinary rendition. Even though we have not seen prison cells that are the
size of a coffin six by three in places like Syria, where people labeled by the US government as enemy
combatants are being held. Even though we have not seen visual evidence of these
atrocities, we have accessed this information in other ways . So we are aware, for
circumstances of war are represented, and with the attempts to pierce the ideological veil thrown over it.

instance, of the massacre at Haditha. But lets return to the question of the images we have actually seen. It seems
that we think about them in eighteenth-century terms. We still believe in enlightenment. I am not suggesting that
we shouldnt be enlightened and that we shouldnt enlighten others. The problem to which I am referring emanates

We
tend to relegate so much power to the image that we assume not only
that the meaning of the image is self-evident but we also fetishize the
image, thinking that it will spur us to action. The images of My Lai and
other instances of massive violence that did not distinguish between
military personnel and civilians are not what organized the anti-war
movement. The photographs did not organize the movement it was
organized by committed women and men who were enraged and engaged,
not only at the point of mobilization, but in other areas of their lives as
well. Their engagement created the context for the reception of those photographs. Their engagement
produced the meaning that was attached to the photographs. The images
depicting torture at Abu Ghraib were released into an environment so
charged with assumptions about the hegemony of US democracy that the
images themselves were overdetermined by the need to explain them in
relation to democracy. The concern with the need to rescue US democracy
pushed the real meaning of torture, and especially the suffering of
prisoners depicted, into the background. People voicing widespread
from the assumption that rational communication and publicity are sufficient as Immanuel Kant suggested.

expressions of shock and revulsion in relation to the photographs asked, How is this
possible?, How can this happen?, and asserted, This is not supposed to
happen all within certain assumptions about US democracy. There was
disbelief and an impulse toward justification, rather than an engagement
with the contemporary meaning of torture and violence seen in the
images. As feminists, we cannot relinquish our own agency to the image. We
cannot even assume that the image has a self-evident relation to its
object. And we must consider the political economy that constitutes the
environment within which images are created and consumed . Feminists adopt
critical habits, including a critical stance toward the visual. And we are also vigilant with respect to the vocabulary

we should develop
habits that impel us to engage in constant criticism of the things that we
wish to change, as well as criticism of the tools that we use to
conceptualize what we want to change.
we use to conceptualize and implement strategies for change. As I indicated before,

Militarization
Military associated with masculinity, women in the military are is
perceived as an insult by foreign adversaries.
Tickner

14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in residence at
the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined after fifteen
years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as president
of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female president of the
ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford University Press, A
Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 9, p. 116-, AO) Examples of Oppression

This is the warriors time, the warriors, the martyrstheyre all men. 13 Those
we feared after 9/11 were angry young men wielding rifles and shouting Death
to America. Many of them were trained in madrassas religious schools that teach little except an
extreme version of Islam to boys and young men; many of them come from refugee camps where
they live in poverty with few prospects in life. Frequently, they are also taught to hate
women; in a situation where most of them feel powerless, the wielding of power
over women can be a boost to self-esteem. Although Mohamed Attas middleclass background does not fit
this profile, this training must have alleviated his sense of inferiority with respect to the women in his own domestic life. According
to Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (2002),

this newest form of Occidentalism, evident in the

teaching of madrassas, comes out of a long, warlike tradition of hatred of the
West, a hatred that appeals to those who feel impotent, marginalized, and
denigrated. Tracing its roots back to nineteenth-century Russia and mid-twentieth-century Japan, they suggest
that the objects of hate associated with Occidentalism, all of which played a
significant role in the attacks of September 11, are materialism, liberalism,
capitalism, rationalism, and feminism. All these phenomena are epitomized in city life with its

multiculturalism, wealth, sexual license, and artistic freedom that result in decadence and moral laxity. The twin towers, as powerful

Gender symbolism and

gender ambivalence borne out of misogyny abound in this discourse; the West is
described as individualist, rational, and hard but, at the same time, decadent,
effete, and addicted to personal safety at the expense of valuing the heroic selfsacrifice expected of real men. Todays Occidentalists taunt the West with
accusations of moral decadence in this world, yet promise sexual rewards for
their men in heaven after their sacrificial death for the cause. For Occidentalists,
it is womens emancipation that leads to decadence. Westoxification denotes a
plague from the West. Those most vulnerable are women, particularly middleclass women with a Western education; these women must be brought under
control and conform to an idealized construct of womanhood (Moghadan 1994, 13). The
proper role for women is to be breeders of heroic men. For the Taliban, Occidental sinfulness was
symbols of urban secular wealth, were an apt target for vengeance against these evils.

present even in Kabul with girls in school and women with uncovered faces populating and defiling the public domain (Buruma and

The ideational and material consequences of this misogynist discourse

was brought home to us through the post9/11 media focus on the plight of
women in Afghanistan. But we must remember that it is not only those out
there who engage in oppositional thinking with its negative gender stereotyping.
Chapter 9, p. 117, AO) America may have surprised these warriors with the determination of its response. Belying bin
Ladens taunts and Fukuyamas fear that the United States was becoming feminized and thus less able to defend itself,
the US military response was swift and strong; it received high approval ratings
from men and women alike.14 From the start, policy-makers framed the attack and the
US response as a war between good and evilthe message to the rest of the
world was that you are either for us or against usthere could be no middle
position. Random attacks on innocent people, identified by their attackers as Muslim, immediately following 9/11, which the
Margalit 2002, 5).

Bush administration went to lengths to denounce, manifested an unpleasant form of Orientalism. Given the massive sense of
insecurity generated by the first foreign terrorist attack on American civilians at home ,

there was something

reassuring about our men protecting us from other men. However, even though
the war exceeded all expectations in its swift destruction of the Taliban and al
Qaeda networks, and despite increased attention to homeland security, the
United States remained uncertain about its ability to deter future terrorist
attacks.15 In light of these continued fears, the US Congress passed the USA Patriot Act,

legislation that allowed the attorney general to detain aliens on mere suspicion
and without a hearing. Prior to its passage, the United States had already detained more than 1,200 young men without
charge; Arab men were subject to ethnic, as well as gender, profiling under the excuse that we were at war. These measures

received strong support across the political spectrum. Criticism was seen as unpatriotic .16 Equally disturbing
was a political climate, typical of countries at war, which fosters intolerance of alternative points of view. Illustrations of this
intolerance were prevalent in media discussion as well as in political discourse. In an article in the New York Times, Edward Rothstein
(2001) articulated his hope that the attacks of September 11 might challenge the intellectual and ethical perspectives of
postmodernism and postcolonialism, thus leading to their rejection. Chastising adherents to these modes of thought for their
extreme cultural relativism and rejection of objectivity and universalism, Rothstein expressed hope that, as it came to be realized
how closely the 9/11 attacks came to undermining the political and military authority of the United States, these ways of thinking
would come to be seen as ethically perverse. While the author did not mention feminism

, feminists are frequently

criticized on the same terms; women and feminists often get blamed in times of
political, economic, and social uncertainty . Kurths fear of feminists destruction of
the social fabric of society is one such example, and the association of patriotism
with hegemonic masculinity challenges women, minorities, and aliens to live
up to this standard. It is the case that postcolonialists and feminists have questioned objectivity and universalism; but

they do so because they claim that these terms are frequently associated with ways of knowing that are not objective but are based
only on the lives of (usually privileged) men. Many feminists are sympathetic with postcolonialism, a body of knowledge that
attempts to uncover the voices of those who have been colonized and oppressed. It is a form of knowledge seeking that resonates
with attempts to recover knowledge about women. In a rather different piece, which acknowledged the recognition accorded to
women of Afghanistan since 9/11, Sarah Wildman (2001) chastised American feminists on the grounds of irrelevance. Claiming that
feminists had an unprecedented public platform because of the attention focused on women in Afghanistan, Wildman accused them
of squandering their opportunity by refusing to support the war. Equating what she called feminist dogma with pacifism, Wildman
asserted that there is no logical reason to believe that nonviolent means always promote feminist ends. Wildman fell into the
essentialist trap of equating feminism with peace that I discussed in Chapter 2; this allowed her to dismiss feminist voices as
irrelevant and unpatriotic. The feminists she selected to quote may have voiced reservations about the war, but feminism
encompasses a wide range of opinions, many of which include fighting for justice, particularly gender justice. And feminist voices
are not all Western, as is often assumed. In Afghanistan, women have been fighting a war that began well before September 11, a

After November 17, 2001, when First Lady Laura Bush used the
presidents weekly radio address to urge worldwide condemnation of the
treatment of women in Afghanistan, a speech that coincided with a State Department report on the Talibans
war against women, their plight was in the headlines in the United States (Stout 2001). Women in Afghanistan had
not always been so oppressed. Prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, women had
been gaining rights; they had served in Parliament and in the professions and
even as army generals. In 1970, 50 percent of students at Kabul University, 60 percent of teachers, and 40 percent of
doctors in Afghanistan were women (Prosser 2001). Frequently, however, steps forward precipitated a
backlash from traditional and rural communities (Amiri 2002). In 1989, Arab militants, working
with the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union based in Peshawar, Pakistan, issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, stating
that Afghan women would be killed if they worked for humanitarian organization s.
Subsequently Afghan women going to work were shot at and several were murdered. Soon after, another edict forbade
Afghan women to walk with pride or walk in the middle of the street. This was
followed by an edict in 1990 that decreed that women should not be educated; if
they were, the Islamic movement would be tainted and thus meet with failure.
According to Human Rights Watch (2001), and supported by RAWA, the various parties that made up the
United Front or Northern Alliance amassed a deplorable record of attacks on
civilians during the civil war that took place in Afghanistan between 1992 and
1996, including the widespread rape of women. The Taliban came to power in 1996, promising to
restore law and order and create a pure Islamic state that would guarantee the personal security
of women and preserve the dignity of families (Mertus 2000, 56). At first, the restoration of order was
seen as beneficial. But soon it was evident that the Taliban sought to erase women from
public life and make them invisible in the name of cleansing Afghan society.
Women were banned from employment, from education, and from going into
public places without the accompaniment of a close male relative; they were
required to be covered from head to toe in the familiar blue burqa. The Ministry for the
Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice ruthlessly enforced these restrictions; in a mockery of female
protection, women were beaten publicly with leather batons containing metal
studs for showing their hands or ankles, participating in home-based schooling, or
violating any other of these restrictions.17 For boys who have grown up and been
socialized in the madrassas, the sight of a woman is the equivalent of seeing the
foreign other, the incarnation of evil itself (Prosser 2001, 2). Given the ban on female
employment, many women, particularly those without male relatives or
supporters, were forced into begging and prostitution; restrictions on mobility
war against women. Chapter 9, p. 118-119, AO)

meant that women and their children did not have access to health care .18 After the
war, many women and children who were family members of fleeing or killed foreign Taliban fighters were stranded inside
Afghanistan with nowhere to go to seek safety. And Afghanistan has always been a large source of refugees; more than 2.5 million

While all displaced

people are vulnerable, displaced women are particularly subject to gender-based
violence and abuse (Mertus 2000, 69). Evidence such as this offers a severe challenge to
Afghans resided in Iran and Pakistan in refugee camps before the war began (Mertus 2000, 53).

the myth that wars are fought for the protection of women and children.

Patriarchy continuously reforms itself to more modernized

means of militarization
Eisenstein 08 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written
feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 32-33, AO)

Traces of patriarchy continue as gender is re-formed and modernized for

the new needs of combat. Racial segregation is now illegal and gender
hierarchies are nuanced so patriarchal privilege is camouflaged but not
less present. And the nuances are embedded in inadequate knowledge about
the varied actual lives of women in the military across the globe.
Hundreds of thousands of women fought for Germany, the Soviet Union
and Britain during World War II; and many of them engaged in combat.
According to DAnn Campbell, approximately 800,000 women served in the Red Army and over half of them were in
front-line units. The Soviets could not afford the luxury of the non-combat/combat classification that preoccupied
the Americans, British and the Germans (Campbell 1993: 30123). A lack of sufficient man-power drew women

Women soldiers died in hand-to-hand combat in

Okinawa while necessity drew women to combat roles rather than a
feminist quest for equality. Slightly more than 200,000 women serve in the enlisted ranks in the
US military at present. Necessity should not be misunderstood here for progress,
or democracy, or feminisms. Women in war-torn countries live this new militarized life sometimes as
into combat, not democratic priorities.

combatants but more often as refugees and displaced people. Countries like Palestine, Israel, Sudan, Iraq, and

Private life and familial

relations take on militarized form as the usual divides of home and battle
are smashed. Sexed and gender relations are remixed in war alongside the
remix of militarized zones like the USA. First World countries get to make
the distinction between militarized life and war more readily than
countries elsewhere. War-torn countries live without the luxury of this
divide. Gender violence in India and the Sudan is publicized and put in view, as both horrific and ordinary.
Gender violence and the gendering of violence appear as one process.
Gender violence can be practiced against males and females, which both
loosens the grip of traditional meanings of gender, while also reinforcing
them. Public rape and publicized gender humiliation are the newest forms of very old practices. People in
the USA were horrified by September 11 2001, because they felt a bit of
what war feels like up closer than usual. People in the USA with loved ones in Iraq and
Afghanistan also feel a bit of war up close. But most of us do not consciously feel the wars
in the sense that we do not walk around with a constant aching and fear .
Afghanistan do not have neat divides between civilian and military realms.

Yet more women in the USA are away at war. As such, women have joined the once-male landscape in greater

These changes alter gendered relations both inside and outside the
military. Women are mobilized for and by combat. It remains to be seen exactly what of established gender
numbers.

remains in these newest wars and how war will change with these newly gendered constructions (Katzenstein
1998).

Military Bases
US military bases hide extreme sexualized and racialized
violence by constructing war as a protection policy.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 50 {Shoell}

Cynthia Enloe has described social structures in place around most U.S.
Army overseas bases where women are often kidnapped and sold into
prostitution; the system of militarized sexual relations has required
explicit U.S. policymaking.53 More than one million women have served as
sex providers for U.S. military personnel since the Korean War. These
women, and others like them, are stigmatized by their own societies . In her
study of prostitution around U.S. military bases in South Korea in the 1970s, Katharine Moon shows how these

person-to-person relations were actually matters of security concern at

the international level. Cleanup of prostitution camps by the South Korean
government, through policing of the sexual health and work conduct of
prostitutes, was part of its attempt to prevent withdrawal of U.S. troops
that had begun under the Nixon Doctrine of 1969. Thus, prostitution as it involved the
military became a matter of top-level U.S.-Korean security politics.
Crossing levels of analysis, Moon demonstrates how the weakness of the
Korean state in terms of its wish to influence the U.S. government
resulted in a domestic policy of authoritarian, sexist control. In other
words, national security translated into social insecurity for these
women.54 By looking at the effects of war on women, we can gain a better
understanding of the unequal gender relations that sustain military
activities. When we reveal social practices that support war and that are variable across societies, we find
that war is a cultural construction that depends on myths of protection; it
is not inevitable , as realists suggest. The evidence we now have about women in conflict situations
severely strains the protection myth; yet, such myths have been important in upholding the legitimacy of war and

A deeper look into these gendered constructions can

help us to understand not only some of the causes of war but how certain
ways of thinking about security have been legitimized at the expense of
others, both in the discipline of IR and in political practice .
the impossibility of peace.

Morality
Western conceptions of universal morality denigrate interpersonal
relationships to the realm of the feminine private
Tickner 14 (J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished
scholar in residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington
DC, which she recently joined after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at
the University of Southern California. Tickner served as president of the International Studies
Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female president of the ISA,
she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 1, p. 25 26,
AO)

Morgenthaus construction of an amoral realm of international power politics is an attempt to resolve what he sees as a fundamental
tension between the moral laws that govern the universe and the requirements of successful political action in a world where states
use morality as a cloak to justify the pursuit of their own national interests. Morgenthaus universalistic morality postulates the
highest form of morality as an abstract ideal, similar to the Golden Rule, to which states seldom adhere: the morality of states is an

Morgenthaus hierarchical ordering of morality

contains parallels with the work of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Based on a study of
the moral development of eighty-four American boys, Kohlberg concludes that the
highest stage of human moral development (which he calls stage six) is the ability to
recognize abstract universal principles of justice; lower on the scale (stage two) is an
instrumental morality concerned with serving ones own interests while
recognizing that others have interests, too. Between these two is an
interpersonal morality that is contextual and characterized by sensitivity to the
needs of others (stage three).9 In her critique of Kohlbergs stages of moral development, Carol Gilligan argues
that they are based on a masculine conception of morality. On Kohlbergs scale,
women rarely rise above the third or contextual stage, but Gilligan claims that
this is not a sign of inferiority, but of difference. Since women are socialized into a
mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative, rather than formal and
abstract, they tend to see issues in contextual rather than in abstract terms (Gilligan
1982, ch. 1). In international relations, the tendency to think about morality either in terms of
abstract, universal, and unattainable standards or as purely instrumental, as
Morgenthau does, detracts from our ability to tolerate cultural differences and to
seek potential for building community in spite of these differences. Using examples from
instrumental morality that is guided by self-interest.

the feminist literature, I have suggested that Morgenthaus attempt to construct an objective, universal theory of international
politics is rooted in assumptions about human nature and morality that, in modern Western culture, are associated with masculinity.
Further evidence that Morgenthaus principles are not the basis for a universalistic and objective theory is contained in his frequent
references to the failure of what he calls the legalistic-moralistic or idealist approach to world politics that he claims was largely
responsible for both the World Wars. Having laid the blame for World War II on the misguided morality of appeasement,
Morgenthaus realpolitik prescriptions for successful political action appear as prescriptions for avoiding the mistakes of the 1930s,
rather than as prescriptions with timeless applicability.

National Security
National security in the context of military uniquely harmful to the
feminine

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 3, p. 52-53, AO)

concept of security is central to the nationalist perspective. For nationalists, security

has generally been subsumed under the rubric of power, particularly military
power, and is usually associated with the security of the nation-state. As discussed in
more detail in Chapter 2, national security is a concept that is particularly problematic for
women. Betty Reardon has argued that, far from protecting women, national security, with its
military connotations, can offer particular dangers for women . According to Reardon,
sexism and militarism are two interdependent manifestations of social violence
(Reardon 1985, 5). Largely excluded from the patriotic duty of defending the state,
women have traditionally been defined as the protected rather than the
protectors, although they have had little control over the conditions of their
protection. Moreover, women experience special vulnerabilities within the state as
frequent victims of family violence, which often takes place outside the protection
of the law. As mentioned above, women are also subject to special economic
vulnerabilities in households, in the workforce, and in the subsistence economy.
Given these special vulnerabilities of women inside society and households, as well as with respect to the
international system, security for women is not necessarily synonymous with national
security. As discussed in previous chapters, a more adequate definition of security would be
multilevel and multidimensional and would include both physical and economic
security. A feminist perspective would therefore define security as the absence of
violence, whether it be military, economic, or sexual. Power in international
relations, whether it is used to explain the behavior of states or classes, has generally been defined in
terms of domination and coercion. While feminists would agree that this type of
power is very real, feminists would argue that there are also other ways of seeing
power as more collective and less zero-sum, such as those discussed in Chapter 1. Power can be
seen, not only as domination, but also as a relationship of mutual enablement. If we
The

were to agree with Marxists that the way we describe reality has an effect on the way we perceive and act, and that autonomy and

then a feminist perspective would assume a

connected, interdependent individual whose behavior includes activities related
to reproduction as well as production. In order to capture these productive and
reproductive activities, the artificial boundaries between the world of rational
economic man in the public sphere of production and the activities that women
perform outside the economy as mothers, caregivers, and subsistence producers
of basic needs must be broken down.5 Breaking down these barriers would help to
reduce the differential value attached to the rational or efficient world of
production and the private world of reproduction. Were childbearing and childrearing to be seen as
more valued activities, it could help to reduce the excessive focus on the productive efficiency
of an ever-expanding commodity productiona focus whose utility in a world of
shrinking resources, vast inequalities, and increasing environmental damage is
becoming questionable. A perspective that takes this redefined individual as its basic unit of analysis could help to
self-sufficiency are unrealistic in many situations,

create an alternative model of political economy that respects human relationships as well as their relation to nature (Kaldor 1986,
454).

Patriotic is the new patriarchal

Eisenstein 08 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written
feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 35-36, AO)

War institutionalizes sexual differentiation while also undermining it. War

demands opposition, differentiation, and the othering of peoples. The
privileging of masculinity underscores all other processes of
differentiation. War is a process by which masculinity is both produced
and reproduced. The heroic warrior is the standard (Hooper 2001: 76, 95). Everyone
else is a pussy, a wimp, a fag. It is why the defeat of the USA in Vietnam was
viewed as emasculating. The defeat required a rearticulation of gender as much as a refocusing of
foreign policy. As recently as 2003 the US gay newspaper The Blade ran an expos of the Tiger Forces the elite
unit that savaged civilians in Vietnam. This highly trained unit of paratroopers, in 1967, cut off the ears and scalps
of their prisoners and donned them as necklaces of triumph (Sallah and Weiss 2003: 45). It is now well documented
that US troops maimed and raped innocents in a series of Vietnamese villages. Yet the Tiger Forces are still fighting
US wars, leading some to say that the only difference between the Afghan and Vietnam wars is that Afghanistan is
brown, and Vietnam was green (Alexievich 1990). One is left to ponder how the ghoulish war atrocities in Vietnam

Vietnam continues to be a reminder of the

unsettling demasculinization of the USA in defeat. It is why Jane Fonda is
still hated for her anti-war activity and remains nothing but pussy to
defenders of this war. She sadly continues to apologize for her anti-war activism, but to no avail.
Gertrude Stein had it right when she said that patriarchal is supposed to be
are a part of the Tiger Forces strategy in Iraq.

the same as patriotic and the patriotic woman is supposed to be silent

and supportive, not subversive

(Higonnet 2003: 20526). Post-Vietnam politics turned to

The US defeat in Vietnam was used to

justify the downsizing and privatizing of the feminized inept government .
remasculinizing the US military for global capitalism.

A leaner and meaner state is what global capitalists wished for along with Donald Rumsfelds desire to restructure
and privatize the military as well. My own trajectory back to thinking about the Vietnam War was when I read about
the Tiger and Delta Forces, but this time in Iraq. And then the 2004 US presidential election brought Vietnam up
once again. Democratic Party nominee John Kerry was a Viet vet and was tainted with it, rather than embraced
because of it. Too much hateful happened there. Millions of tons of bombs were dropped on civilians and soldiers
alike. Three and a half million Vietnamese died; 58,000 US soldiers were killed. Those who returned came home
with terrible memories that they could not live with. They tell their stories in the documentary Winter Soldier (20/20
Productions 2004). They speak against the war and tell the horror: women and children indiscriminately murdered,
mutilated, burned and killed, cut open while still living, prisoners thrown alive from helicopters. They speak of how
they were trained to think of the Vietnamese as gooks and commies and not human beings. They say they were
totally scared for their own lives and did what they had to to survive. Recently I watched Winter Soldier again. I sat
listening and watching and not quite able to do so. The footage of young Vietnamese women screaming and
begging for their lives was beyond bearable. I kept thinking that if this is the truth, we should not be allowed to
forget. These acts cannot be forgiven because they must not be forgotten. They must be remembered. I am not
speaking of the need to punish when I renounce forgiveness. But I am speaking of the need to not forgive the

The feminizing loss of the Vietnam War was a significant US

historical moment that refashioned the historical process of gender
renegotiation. The war became a vehicle for expansion and specification
of altered gender relations ( Jeffords 1989: 5, 168). The oppositional gender
relations became more transitory and fluid. Gender would become more
supple; but not more equal. The gender divide would still exist but not in
simply old formations. War would be shaped less by biological sex by
ones male body, by maleness and more by masculine discourses that
can be adopted by males or females. Discourses shape what gender looks
like. There is a move away from gendered individuals and toward
gendered discourses (Cohn 1995). This process of gender renegotiation took
on particular significance in the Gulf War of 1991. This was the first US
post-Vietnam war, and it was the first US war that acknowledged the
troops as both male and female.
making of war.

Okinawa
Dynamics of militarism are deeply rooted in Okinawa
Koetse No Date (Manya, Sinologist/Japanologist. Editor-in-Chief of What's on Weibo, freelance writer &
scholar, Local Rape, Global Issue, http://www.manyakoetse.com/local-rape-global-issue/, AO)

American Labour Day of 1995, four US servicemen were

standing in a bar in Naha, talking about having some fun and going to
get a girl. They took a car and searched the area around their base
where they spotted a 12-year-old girl who had just bought a schoolbook.
She was taken into the car, raped by two of the men, and was left behind
on a remote strand of beach. The girl was able to drag herself up and go to one of the houses behind the
beach. Since the girl could describe the men and even remembered their license
plate, the men were arrested within hours of the crime (Angst 2003; Desmond 1995).
The rape on the schoolgirl sparked a heated debate on the presence of US
troops in Okinawa: should the military bases stay or go? But the rape was
not only a catalyst for this debate. It also marked a general trend that was
taking place all over Asia. Before elaborating on this trend, I will first start at what happened on a national level
after the rape of the girl, and why the situation developed this way. The rape and the arrest of the men
immediately prompted strong reactions from different groups in Okinawa .
On September 4th,

Women called for extra security around the US bases, landowners started protesting for being forced to lease their land to the
military, and politicians started questioning the nature and role of the US-Japan Security Treaty. Since US officials refused to turn
over the perpetrators to Japan for the first three weeks after the crime, the incident even launched an international debate between

The reactions on the

rape are strongly connected to the history of Okinawa that has lead to a
dominant anti-militaristic sentiment on the island and a tense relationship
with the Japanese mainland. Firstly, in 1879 the island was annexed by Tokyo against the peoples will.
Washington and Tokyo over the US bases in Okinawa (Angst 2003; Cooley & Marten 2006).

Secondly, the island had to deal with one of the bloodiest battles of the W.W.II during the Battle of Okinawa, where 216.000
Okinawans were killed by the US. Thirdly, from 1951 to 1972 Okinawa was occupied by the American military. In the present day,
Okinawa still does not really have peace; twenty per cent of the land is occupied by the US bases and more than 20.000 serviceman
are based there, because of the Security Treaty between Japan and the US (Cooley & Marten 2006). The presence of the Americans
has had a great impact on the lives of people. From 1972 to 2001 there have been 5076 reported cases of crime by US soldiers,
including assault and rape. There have been 157 aircraft accidents. Fires occur through life-fire exercises and there is water pollution
because of oil leaks. In short: the presence of the US military does not bring a sense of protection or peace to the Okinawan people

Okinawa has become an island of

protests. She remarks, however, that there is not one singular Okinawan struggle; in
fact there are multiple struggles, which are fragmented and often at odds
with each other (Allen 2008). The rape of 1995 indirectly also demonstrated the existence of these different struggles;
(Okinawa Pref Website). Tanji (2006) points out in her book that

different actors within Okinawa politics took this incident as an anchor to chain their own agendas to. The rape did not only
represent a larger group of female victims, it also symbolized the suffering of the entire prefecture. An essential term in the
interpretation of the rape is marginalization. The news of the rape resulted in so much commotion mainly because of

When the schoolgirl was raped,

women groups were among the first to respond and stand up to the
media. Women in Okinawa have been a marginalized group for a long time .
It has always been women who had the most direct contact with American GIs over the last 50 years. Women worked
as waitresses, maids and prostitutes to serve them whilst economically
supporting their family. Although many women were sex workers for their
familys sake, they have been heavily stigmatized by society. Women have
been the primary victims of sexual and other forms of physical violence
committed by military personnel from the base, which has the highest
crime rate of all the US foreign military bases. In short, the military station on Okinawa
marginalizations. These marginalizations exist on different levels.

influences the everyday life of the women and poses a threat to their security. Women groups do not accept the structural violence
anymore and want their voices to be heard (Keyso 2000; Takazato 2000; Angst 2003). To the women groups the girls rape
connected to the issue of womens safety; womens safety needs to be protected by taking measures and encouraging initiatives
that actually secure and improve womens lives. Women took the case of the girl in order to reach their goals. They have been
marginalized not only by the mainland, who allowed the bases on the island, but also by the local government of Okinawa itself,
since it does not take active measures to improve the lives of women. As explained before

, Okinawa itself is also

a victim of marginalization . Japans security policy marginalizes Okinawan people by allowing the US bases

To the Okinawan government,

the rape did not longer represent a larger group of female victims; it only
symbolized the suffering of the entire prefecture, and the crime itself was
hidden from view. Perhaps you could even say that the Okinawan Ota
government took advantage of the anti-base sentiments that rose through
the rape in order to promote an economic agenda that actually neglected
womens matters (Angst 2003). The rape itself became an insignificant incident, and the meaning was lost, as it
became a symbol for hegemony. Okinawa is also referred to as the
sacrificed or prostituted daughter of Japan, since Japan sacrificed one
peripheral part of the nation in order to secure its own safety. However, the overall
to take over a great deal of their land and affecting their personal security.

US-Japan security relationship requires a US basing presence; this is how the relations were governed by the one-sided security
treaty and by Japans post-war constitution that was put into place under the heavy pressure and guidance of Washington. It made it
impossible for Japan to create its own military organization, and therefore the US would be present in Japan in order to protect the
national security (Cooley & Marten 2006). In this way, Japans sovereignty is played down by America. Japan avoids the permanent
presence of the US military as much as possible by externalizing them to Okinawa. The rape on the girl has been a new way for
Tokyo to put revision of the security treaty on the agenda with Washington. All these different actors (women-groups, Okinawan
people, Okinawa government and Tokyo) are powerless in a way, and all of them had to make sacrifices. When a young, pure girl

The rape
of the schoolgirl moved beyond the scope of Okinawa and Japan, becoming
a significant case in the broader area of the US bases over Asia. Among others,
was raped by a group of Americans, she became the perfect symbol to all of them to express their own suffering.

there are military bases in South Korea and Philippines as well. In the alliances with these countries, the US also is the dominant

This imbalance of power in alliance at the top-level

is an important factor in what goes on at the grassroot-level, since this
imbalance is also mirrored at the level of power in gender relations; the
extension and restructuring of the military bases depend on the imbalance
of power. This extension and restructuring goes hand-in-hand with exploitation of host
communities by the polluting of the environment, the abuse of women and
children through the sex-industry, violence and rape. In this way the
partner, like with Japan (Feffer 2008).

power dynamics of militarism eventually rely on the gendered relations of

dominance and subordination, where womens bodies, the land and the
host communities are feminized (Feffer 2008). These gendered power dynamics also become clear through
foreigners, like women, are frequently portrayed as the
other: nonwhites and tropical countries are often depicted as irrational,
emotional, and unstable. These are all characteristics that are also
attributed to women. In the West, or in the US military, one is taught to think
about international politics in a way that is very similar to the way in
which one is taught to think about gender differences. That is why it is essential to
Sylvester (2002), who says that

acknowledge these hierarchical constructions and the way they relate to power. If these constructions are not revealed, the relations
of domination and subordination will always stay the same (Sylvester 2002). Whilst Realism does not pay attention to the gendered

when gender would be a central

category of analysis, the field of IR might look completely different.
aspect of power dynamics, it is exactly that what Feminism does;

Persian Gulf
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/tom-engelhardt/the-imperialunconscious_b_172178.html]
Here, according to Bloomberg News, is part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gatess
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 20052006 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, theres 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. Its hardly
surprising that the Secretary of Defense would pick up such a phrase, part of
Washingtons everyday arsenal of words and images when it comes to geopolitics,
power, and war. And yet, make no mistake, this is Empire-speak, Americanstyle. Its the language behind which lies a deeper structure of argument and
thought that is essential to Washingtons vision of itself as a planetstraddling 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
lets consider just a few entries in what might be thought of as The Dictionary of
American Empire-Speak.

They are imperial feminists and render the patriarchy invisible

- supporting Iraqi womens groups discredits their movement.
Chew 8 (Huibin Amelia, Dr. Chew received her Ph.D in American studies and ethnicity from USC Dornsife and
is a Fulbright Scholar. Whats left? After imperial feminist hijackings, Feminism and War: Confronting US
Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, pgs 82-83)//JS

We in the US would do well to first recognize that the greatest purveyor

of violence is often US military and economic policies; as such, feminist
solidarity is impossible without concentrating on our role to oppose these.

It is essential that, if we are US residents, we predicate any political

solidarity regarding Iraqi womens worsening conditions on demanding an
immediate end to occupation military, economic, and political . The occupiers
pretensions of feminism and posturing at defending womens interests reinforce a fraught terrain for those in Iraq
and the USA concerned with gendered violence. Those protesting womens status in Iraq or Afghanistan may find
themselves used as pawns to justify war. Iraqi womens groups risk attack for any foreign ties, or evidence of being
agents of occupation. Indeed, these groups are being targeted by Republican organizations and pro-occupation
interests for co-optation.

We must cynically understand that our support for Iraqi

womens groups may help discredit them or lead to their opportunistic
attack both by those who would construe that support as imperialist,
and those who would use Iraqi womens predicament to promote military
aggression. An imperial feminist standpoint , exemplified by the quote from Laura Bush,
is influential in the self-perceptions of many US women today. Such a view professes a concern for global South,
non-white women without acknowledging the role of racism, colonialism, and economic exploitation in shaping their
conditions. It

tends to impose a feminist vision determined by powerful elite

actors, rather than letting local women address the problems most
relevant to them. Not simply Republicans but even liberal feminists have
supported US occupation and military action to liberate women in
Afghanistan and Iraq. We must face the dominant US ideology: that our culture represents the epitome
of womens liberation. Gendered oppression is largely considered irrelevant to women in the USA a blight instead
reserved for people in other countries. Those very qualities that culturally distinguish Americans from the global
South other become vaunted as symbols of our superiority whether democracy, capitalist consumerism,
multicultural pluralism, or specifically regarding womens status, a mode of commodified sexual expression.

Burqas and veils have come to embody the ultimate in gendered

persecution. Bikinis equal freedom; sex is emancipation. In this way,
imperial feminist attitudes help to render our own patriarchy invisible.
US leftists who neglect and fail to grapple with gender are partly responsible, and must be part of the remedy.

But

Rational Choice Theory

Rational choice theory is based on a partial representation of
human behavior only typical of western men; their aff cannot
hope to account for anyone outside of them.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 51-52 {Shoell}

Donna Haraway claims that all scientific theories are embedded in

particular kinds of stories, or what she terms fictions of science .55 IR
feminists, like some other critical theorists, particularly those concerned with genealogy, have examined the stories
on which realism and neorealism base their prescriptions for states national-security behavior, looking for evidence

Feminist reanalysis of the so-called creation myths of

international relations, on which realist assumptions about states
behavior are built, reveals stories built on male representations of how
individuals function in society. The parable of mans amoral, self-interested behavior in the state of
of gender bias.

nature, made necessary by the lack of restraint on the behavior of others, is taken by realists to be a universal
model for explaining states 52 gendered dimensions behavior in the international system. But, as Rebecca Grant
asserts, this is a male, rather than a universal, model: were life to go on in the state of nature for more than one
generation, other activities such as childbirth and child rearing, typically associated with women, must also have
taken place. Grant also claims that Rousseaus stag hunt, which realists have used to explain the security dilemma,
ignores the deeper social relations in which the activities of the hunters are embedded. When women are absent
from these foundational myths, a source of gender bias is created that extends into international-relations theory.56

Feminists are also questioning the use of more scientifically based

rational-choice theory, based on the instrumentally rational behavior of
individuals in the marketplace that neorealists have used to explain
states security-seeking behavior. According to this model, states are
unproblematically assumed to be instrumental profit maximizers pursuing
power and autonomy in an anarchic international system. Where international
cooperation exists, it is explained not in terms of community but, rather, in terms of enlightened self-interest.

rational-choice theory is based on a partial representation

of human behavior that, since women in the West have historically been
confined to reproductive activities, has been more typical of certain men .57
Feminists suggest that

Characteristics such as self-help, autonomy, and power maximizing that are prescribed by realists as securityenhancing behavior are very similar to the hegemonic, masculine-gendered characteristics described in chapter 1.

The instrumentally competitive behavior of states, which results in power

balancing, is similar to equilibrium theory, or the market behavior of
rational-economic man. Therefore, it tends to privilege certain types of
behaviors over others. While states do indeed behave in these ways, these models offer us only a
partial understanding of their behavior. As other IR scholars, too, have pointed out, states engage in
cooperative as well as conflictual behavior; privileging these masculinist
models tends to delegitimate other ways of behaving and make them
appear less realistic.

Rational, disembodied language of IR precludes discussion of

death and war which can only be spoken of through feminist
international relations.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and

Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 52-53 {Shoell}
Does the fact that states national-security policies are often legitimated by appealing to masculine characteristics,
such as power and self-help, mean that certain types of foreign-policy behaviorsstanding tall, rather than wimping
outare seen as more legitimate than others? Could it be that men who, in the role of defense experts, must
employ tough masculine language and suppress any feminized thoughts when constructing strategic options,

Carol Cohn
claims that the language we use shapes the way we view the world and
thus how we act on it. Her analysis of the language of U.S. security
experts, whose ideas have been important for mainstream security studies, suggests that this
masculine-gendered discourse is the only permissible way of speaking
about national security if one is to be taken seriously by the strategic
community. This rational, disembodied language precludes discussion of
the death and destruction of war, issues that can be spoken of only in
emotional terms stereotypically associated with women. In other words, the
limits on what can be said with the language of strategic discourse
constrains our ability to think fully and well about national security . In their
come to regard more cooperative choices as unthinkable and cooperative behavior as unlikely?58

analysis of U.S. policy on bombing Indochina during the Vietnam War, Jennifer Milliken and David Sylvan examine
the discourse ofU.S. policymakers. They claim it was gendered.59 W hen

policymakers spoke or
wrote about South Vietnam, it was portrayed as weak and feminized, its
population as hysterical and childlike; the North Vietnamese, on the other
hand, were characterized as brutal fanaticsas manifesting a perverted
form of masculinity. The authors claim that bombing policy, responding to these
gendered portrayals, was different in each case. While not denying the reality of what
policymakers do, Milliken and Sylvan, like Cohn, claim that words have power and, therefore, consequences; the
way in which policymakers and scholars construct reality has an effect on how they act upon and explain that

Gender-differentiated images are often used in foreign policy to

legitimate certain options and discredit others. Therefore, Walts
aspiration for separating the political from the scientific is
questionable. In other words, theories cannot be separated from political
practice.
reality.

Religion
The 1acs focus on religion ignores the ways in which religion
uniquely harms women

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 9, p. 121-123, AO)

Religious fundamentalists, both Christian and Islamic, used the 9/11 crisis to
criticize womens advances: this tendency reflected a much more general phenomenon. As many
feminists have pointed out, all fundamentalist religions are, to various degrees, bad for
women. Historically, most religions have been as male-dominated as militaries.
The connection between religious fanaticism, be it Christian, Judaic, or Islamic,
and the suppression of women is almost universal. The patriarchal family, with its
control of women, is usually central to fundamentalist movements and is often
seen as the panacea for social ills (Yuval-Davis 1997, 63). A paradox of fundamentalist movements is
that often women collude with and seek comfort in them; and, in spite of their subservience in
religious institutions, women constitute a majority of active members of most
religions (Yuval-Davis 1997, 63). Often, in the name of religion, women bear the brunt of
identity politics that is frequently expressed in terms of control over their life
choices. At the 1994 United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and at the UN Womens
Conference in Beijing in 1995, the Vatican and other conservative Catholic groups joined with right-wing Muslim
forces in their opposition to womens human and reproductive rights . In many Muslim societies, the

majority of the population is not literate, so religious knowledge is controlled by

the ruling class, who interpret texts for their own benefit and use it to control
others. According to Zeiba Shorish-Shamley (2002), the Quran gives equal rights to men and
women, and women were leaders in early Islammodest clothing was
recommended so that when men and women met in public discussion,
intellectuality rather than sexuality would be emphasized. When radical Muslim
movements are on the rise, women are canaries in the mine (Goodwin and Neuwirth
2001). In the name of Islamic fundamentalism, the definition of collective identity is
increasingly being tied to definitions of gender . According to Women Living Under Muslim Laws
(WLUML), an international network of women, construction of the Muslim woman is integral to the construction of
Muslimness, explaining, in part, the emphasis on controlling all aspects of womens lives (WLUML 1997, 23).
Ironically, the weakening of the patriarchal family structure may be a contributing
cause of these movements (Moghadan 1994, 15). Azza Karam (2000, 6970) sees the emergence

of neo-patriarchy, a confluence of patriarchy and dependence that embodies

the tension between internal patriarchal power structures and outside pressures
of modernization. It is in the reinstatement of cultural values in response to pressures of globalization that
women in the Arab world tend to be most affected. Defining fundamentalism as the use of
religion to gain and mobilize political power, Women Living Under Muslim Laws
has argued that, with the ascendancy of identity politics, secular space shrinks,
with negative consequences for women (WLUM 1997, 3).25 And, when women fight for
their rights, they are frequently accused of betrayineg their culture and religion.
Although not reducible to each other, religion bears a close relationship to culture. Gender
relations come to be seen as constituting the essence of cultures (Yuval-Davis 1997,
43). Women are often required to carry the burden of cultural representation: their
proper behavior embodies lines that signify a collectivitys boundaries. Women are
transmitters of group values and traditions; as agents of socialization of the young , their place is in the
home. For some, this is an honor rather than a burden, so all fundamentalist movements have women supporters
as well as opponents (Moghadan 1994, 19). Rina Amiri (2001) has claimed that the Western world has contributed
to the perception that the conflict in Afghanistan was a battle between East and West by centering on the place of
women in its depiction of Islam as repressive and backward. She has also suggested that a Western

approach could damage a long-term vision for an indigenous model of a just

society because a Western model can be contextually inappropriate for Afghan women and Islam traditionalists

who are sympathetic to women but who will reject what is perceived as Western (Amiri 2002). Conversely, WLUML
(1997, 6) has claimed that well-meaning people, wanting to distance themselves from hatred of Islam as well as the
colonial past, epitomized in Orientalist thought, have frequently fallen into the trap of cultural relativism. Consistent
with some of Rothsteins more negative assessments of postcolonialism, but in the name of cultural sensitivity, this
can lead to endorsement of the right to seclude women.

Security
The aff engages in political practices that gender war and
peace, relegating the feminine to sphere of illegitimacy
Tickner 1

(J. Ann., feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in residence at
the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined after fifteen
years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Gendering world politics:
issues and approaches in the post-Cold War era)
War and conflict have been fundamental to a discipline whose founding texts include Thucydides History of the
Pelopponesian War and Machiavellis Prince. Motivated by the devastation of two world wars in the first half of the
twentieth century, the contemporary discipline of
internationalrelationswasfoundedbyscholarssearchingforexplanationsforthe causes of war and prescriptions for its
avoidance. During the Cold War, the predominance of the realist paradigm was due to its focus on U.S./Soviet
rivalry; national-securitystudies,whichwasbasedonarealistworldviewand studied the strategic implications of this
rivalry, became an important subfieldinthediscipline.WiththeendoftheColdWar,however,thecentrality of nationalsecurity studies and the predominance of realism began to be questioned .

Scholars skeptical of
realisms claim that the future would soon look like the past began to
introduce new security issues, new definitions of security, and new ways
to analyze them. At a more fundamental level, critical-security studies, a new approach situated on the

critical side of the third debate, began to question the scientific foundations of the field that had been first applied

It was within the context of these debates about ontology and

epistemology that feminist perspectives on security began to be
articulated.1 Security specialists in universities and research institutions
played an important role in designing U.S. security policy during the Cold
War. For this reason their work was aimed at policymakers and military
experts, an audience that traditionally included very few women and one
that has not been particularly concerned with the kind of security issues
important to many women. While national security has been a privileged
category both in the discipline of international relations and in
international high politics, the term woman is antithetical to our
stereotypical image of a national-security specialist . Women have rarely been security
in security studies.

providers in the conventional sense of the term, as soldiers or policymakers; in the U.S. Department of Defense in

women occupied only 14.6 percent of all officer ranks and only 5
percent of the top four positions in these ranks.2 It is only recently that women have
begun to enter the IR security field in significant numbers.3 Yet women have been writing
about security from a variety of perspectives for a long time; their voices,
however, have rarely been heard. For these reasons, feminist perspectives
on security are quite different from those of conventional security studies.
August 1999,

Tothemainstream,theyoftenappear to be outside traditional disciplinary boundaries. I begin this chapter by

overviewing traditionalthinkingonsecurity,most ofwhichissituatedintherealistparadigm.ThenIreviewsomeoftherecent
attempts to broaden the security agenda as well as some of the criticalsecurity literature that, besides raising new
issues, is challenging realisms epistemologicalandontologicalfoundations.Afterexaminingsomefeminist literature
that is documenting womens activities in war as well as the ways
inwhichwarisimpactingonwomen,Ielaborateonsomefeministcritiques of realist understandings of security as well as
some feminist contributions to understanding issues of state and national identities and theirsimilarities with, and

War and peace are frequently portrayed as

gendered concepts; while womens voices have rarely been granted
legitimacy in matters of war and national security, they have been
stereotypically associated with idealized versions of peace. Having
analyzed these relationships (war and masculinity; peace and femininity
relationships that are, as I will suggest, quite problematic) I conclude by
offering some feminist redefinitions of security that attempt to get beyond
these unhelpful dichotomies and contribute to a more comprehensive
understanding of security issues.
differences from, critical-security studies.

The affirmative engages in realist practices which provides and

emphasis on a hostile international environment which has
promises of border boundaries, thus increasing security
measures, which will ensure perpetual war.
Tickner 2001

(J. Ann. , feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Gendering world
politics: issues and approaches in the post-Cold War era)
Following World War II, an emergent, self-named realist school of international relations claimed that the lack of
military preparedness on the part of the Allied powers, as well as what it saw as a naive faith in the possibility of
international law andinstitutionsonthepartofthoseittermed idealists, contributed to the wars outbreak.

Realists believe that, in an anarchical world of sovereign, self-interested

states, war is always a possibility; therefore, states must rely on their own
power and capabilities rather than international agreements to enhance
their national security. Althoughtheir portrayal of IR in the interwar period, which they claimed was
captured by idealist thinking, was probably more of a move to legitimate realismthan an accurate portrayal of socalled idealist thinking, realists questioned
idealistsbeliefinhumanprogressandthepossibilityofaninternationalsociety; realists see only an anarchy,
characterized by repetitive competition and conflict. 4

Therealist/idealist debate in IR comes

out of these conflicting worldviews that differ over their belief in the
possibility for peace and cooperation.Since 1945, the realist side of the debate has

predominated, particularly with respect to analyses of issues related to conflict and security. Peace research, which
has attempted to specify conditions necessary for a less conflictual
world,hasproceededasaseparatefieldontheedgesofthediscipline. While

neorealism and
neoliberalism, more recent iterations of these contending positions, are
closer together than earlier realist and idealist positions, neorealism has
been the predominant approach in security studies, while neoliberals have
been primarily, but not exclusively, concerned with matters related to
economic relations between states.5 Neorealists and neoliberals agree that both national
security and economic welfare are important, but they differ in the relative emphasis they placeon
thesegoals.Thesetendencies have had the effect of further reinforcing realisms predominance in security studies.

Realists define security in political/military terms as the protection of the

boundaries and integrity of the state and its values against the dangers of
a hostile international environment. Neorealists emphasize the anarchical structure of the
system, which they liken to the Hobbesian state of nature,
ratherthandomesticdeterminantsasbeingtheprimarycontributortostates insecurities. Skeptical of the neoliberal
claim that internationalinstitutions can mitigate the dangerous consequences of anarchy where there are no

realists claim that wars occur

because there is nothing to prevent them.6 States, therefore, must rely on
their own capabilities to ensure their security. As realists have
acknowledged, this self-help system often results in what they describe as
a security dilemma; measures that are justified by one state as part of a
legitimate, security-enhancing policy are likely to be perceived by others
as a threatening military buildup.7 Seeking more scientific rigor, neorealists have used gamerestraints on the self-interested behavior of sovereign states,

theoretic models to explain the security dilemma,whichis often characterized as a prisoners-dilemma game.8 States
are postulated as unitary actors whose internal characteristics, beyond an assessment of their relative capabilities,
are not seen as necessary for understanding their vulnerabilitiesorsecurity-enhancingbehavior
abehaviorinwhichstateshave been engaged for centuries.9 In an often-cited 1991 review of the literature in the
security fielda field that he suggested had recently undergone a welcome resurgence

realist Stephen
Walt claimed that the main focus of security studies is the phenomenon of
war: it may be defined as the study of threat, the use and control of
military force, and the conditions that make the use of force more likely .10
DuringwhatWalt termedthegoldenageofsecuritystudies(which he suggested ended in the mid 1960s ), the
central question was how states could use weapons of mass destruction
as instruments of policy given the risks of nuclear exchange. Heavily dominated
by U.S. strategic thinking about nuclear weapons and the security problems of the United States and its NATO allies,

the field of national security was based on the assumption that, since

nuclear wars were too dangerous to fight, security was synonymous with
nuclear deterrence and power balancing. Power balancing is seen by
realists as the primary mechanism for enhancing stability. During the Cold War, the
balance of power was bipolar, ratherthanmultipolar;certain realists saw this balance as one that afforded increased
stability.11 The turn toward science in IR, which ushered in the second debate between those who believed in the
possibilities of methods drawn from the natural sciences and those who preferred more historical interpretive
methods, was strongly associated with security studies. Waltzs, Theory of International Politics, which offered a
structural explanation of the securityseeking behavior of states, was an important articulation of the scientific
method. In his review, Walt was enthusiastic about this move to what he termed a more scientific, less political,
security studies based on systematic social-scientific research. Defending rationalist methods, Walt applauded
realisms scientific turn; he claimed that the resurgence of security studies was facilitated by its adoption of the

Walt argued that

security studies should engage in three main theoretical activities: theory
creation, or the development of logically related causal propositions;
theory testing according to standards of verification and falsification; and
theory application, or the use of existing knowledge to illuminate specific
policy problems.12 He noted approvingly that peace researchers were also beginningto address issues of
norms and objectives of social science. Advocating a positivist research agenda,

military strategy and defense policyinamoresophisticated way, thus leading to a convergence of the two
perspectives. Walt went on to warn of counterproductive tangents, such as the postmodern approach that, he
claimed, has seducedotherareasofinternational studies, a development that he clearly viewed as dangerous. Walt
asserted that security studies had profited from its connection to real-world issues; if it were to succumb to the
tendency to pursue the trivialor thepolitically irrelevant, its practical value would decline. In spite of Walts
positive words about conventional security studies, the end of the Cold War eroded the realist consensus and threw
its agendainto disarray. The demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact ushered in a system in which major
war among the great powers appeared unlikely. Somehavegoneasfaraspredictingtheendofcrossborderconflictasatool of state policy.13 Power balancing seemed like an unlikely explanation for wars of state
formation and state disintegration, which have been the predominant types of conflict in the late twentieth century.
Beginning in the 1980s, but further stimulated by these changes, the field of security studies started to broaden its

realists continue to hold the belief thatconflict

betweenthegreatpowersislikelytoreemerge,otherssee a new security
agenda based on ethnic conflict, failed states, and emerging North/South
boundaries demarcated by stability and conflict. Other scholars, many of whom are
agenda; while certain

outside the realist tradition, have begun to debate whether the definition of security should be
broadenedbeyonditsexclusive military and statist focus; in a highly interdependent world that faces multiple

scholars are claiming that military definitions of national

security, as opposed to a more comprehensive global security, may be
fundamentally flawed.
security threats, certain

State
National sovereignty is premised on gendered notions of
sovereignty.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 53 {Shoell}
Most feminists would agree with constructivists that state behavior cannot be understood without analyzing issues

The gendered
identities of states and the construction of national ideologies should be
examined in order to better understand their security-seeking behavior.
Attention to issues of identity is particularly important for understanding
the types of ethnonationalist wars that dominate the contemporary
security agenda. While critical-security studies has emphasized the importance of identity for
of identity and the social relations in which identities and behaviors are embedded.

understanding state behavior, feminist theorizing is distinctive insofar as it reveals how these identities often

An examination of the historical development of

state sovereignty and state identities as they have evolved over time does
indeed suggest deeply gendered constructions that have not included
women on the same terms as men. Early states in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe
were identified with the person of the sovereign king. Hobbess depiction of the Leviathan, a
man in armor wearing a crown and carrying a sword, serves as a visual
representation of this early-modern form of sovereign authority. With the
advent of republican forms of government in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the identity of the people remained limited;
women were incorporated slowly into the political process and it is still
questionable whether they have achieved a legitimate voice in the
construction of foreign policy.60 We must conclude, therefore, that the historical construction of
depend on the manipulations of gender.

the state, upon which the unitary-actor model in international theory is based, represents a gendered, masculine

the image of a foreign policy maker has been strongly

associated with elite, white males and representations of hegemonic
masculinity.
model. In the West,

The state constantly attempts to control gender by

maintaining narratives of protecting housewives and valorizing
female domesticity.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 54 {Shoell}
From the time of their foundation,

states have sought to control the right to define

political identity. Since their legitimacy has constantly been threatened by the undermining power of

subnational and transnational loyalties, states survival and success have depended on the creation and
maintenance of legitimating national identities; often these identities have depended on the manipulation of
gendered representations that are constructed and reconstructed over time. While there is a close coincidence
between states and types of hegemonic masculinity, nationalist identities are more ambiguously gendered.

Drawing on metaphors that evoke matrimonial and familial relations, the

nation has been portrayed as both male and female. The ideology of the
family has been an important metaphor on which states rely for
reinforcing their legitimacy; it also provides a powerful symbol for individuals need for community.

motherlands, fatherlands, and homelands evoke a shared sense of

transcendental purpose and community for states and their citizens alike.
Nevertheless, the sense of community implicit in these family metaphors
is deeply gendered in ways that not only legitimate foreign-policy
practices but also reinforce inequalities between men and women. For
Images of

example, during the postWorldWar II era in the United States, these gendered images evolved over time and
adapted to new understandings of gender relations; however, they continually served as legitimators of U.S. foreign

postWorld
War II reinstantiation of traditional gender roles served to uphold U.S.
containment policy.61 The containment doctrine was articulated through
the U.S. white, middle-class family consisting of a male breadwinner and a
female housewife. Female domesticity was lauded as serving the nation as
women were encouraged to stay at home and stock pantries and fall-out
shelters in the event of nuclear war. The U.S. family was portrayed as a safe, protected space in
policy. In her examination of the culture of the early Cold War, Elaine Tyler May claims that the

a dangerous nuclear world; consumerism highlighted U.S. superiority over the Soviet Union. In contrast to this
feminized domesticity,

real men stood up against the Communists. The

witchhunts of the McCarthy era frequently associated U.S. Communism
with homosexuality and other types of behavior that did not conform with
middle-class respectability. During the 1960s and 1970s, these traditional family roles were
disrupted at home by the womens movement and abroad by the Vietnam War, which shattered
Americans faith in the righteousness of the anti-Communist crusade and
its strong, masculinist images. Steve Niva analyzes what he terms the remasculinization of
American society during the Reagan era of the 1980s. While the return to the nuclear family
of the 1950s was impossible after the upheavals and changes in social
mores of the 1960s, a new form of masculinity that combined toughness
with compassion emerged. Niva claims that the Gulf War of 1991 was the
showcase for this new form of compassionate masculinity; its slight
feminization allowed for the presence of military women in the Gulf as well
as portraying a more enlightened masculinity that could be contrasted
with the less-benign form in societies in the Gulf region where women
suffered under the overtly repressive gender relations of Muslim
societies.62 Both the contrast between traditional gender roles in the United States and the Soviet Union,
where working women were the norm in the early Cold War, and the distinction between an enlightened masculinity
in the United States and the repressive policies against Muslim women of the Gulf serve to reinforce boundaries

The
construction of national identities around the notion of a safe, or civilized,
space inside depends on the construction of an outside whose
identity often appears strange or threatening.
between self and other. Such distinctions evoke images of safe havens in a dangerous world.

The state uses IR to justify racialized and gendered violence.

Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 55-56 {Shoell}

the Western state system has constructed its

encounters with uncivilized or dangerous others in ways that have
justified expansion, conquest, and a state of military preparedness . Such
Since its birth in early modern Europe,

rhetoric is being deployed today with respect to dangers in the South. While I would not deny the very real problem
of conflict in the South, such conflicts take on particular identities that render them intractable and often
incomprehensible. Newly articulated North/South boundaries between mature and immature anarchies reinforce

Anarchy, or the state of nature, is not only a metaphor for the

way in which people or states can be expected to behave in the absence of
these distinctions.

government; it also depicts an untamed natural environment in need of

civilization whose wide and chaotic spaces are often described as female.
Such language was frequently used during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to legitimate colonial rule over peoples who were deemed
incapable of governing themselves.63 It is not only threats from outside against which
nationalist ideologies are created. The threats that states pose to their own citizens, issues of importance on the
new security agenda, are often exacerbated by the manipulation of nationalist ideologies that pits ruling groups

Frequently, the reassertion of cultural or

religious identities, in the name of national unity, may take the form of
repressive measures against women. Nira Yuval-Davis suggests that the defining of women as
against outsiders within their own territory.

the bearers of culturea practice that often accompanies these movements reinforces womens inequality.

When gender relations come to be seen as the essence of culture,

women who stray outside the definition of good women can be punished
for bringing shame to their families; besides solidifying ethnic identities,
this can be used as a way of legitimizing the control and oppression of
women.64 Such behavior is illustrated in the way women have been regulated by the
Taliban in Afghanistan. National identities are often used by domestic elites to promote state or group
interests and hide race and class divisions. Defining moments in collective historical memories are frequently wars
of national liberation, great victories in battles against external enemies, or the glories of former imperialist

Scholars who study

nationalism have emphasized the importance of warfare for the creation
of a sense of national community. Not only does war mobilize the national
consciousness, it also provides the myths and memories that create a
sense of national identity, an identity for which people have been willing
to die and kill.65 As Jean Elshtain asserts, societies are, in some sense, the sum total of their war
stories.66War stories are often used to gain a societys support for a war; frequently, these stories rely on
the portrayal of a certain kind of masculinity associated with heroism and
strength. These portrayals can be racialized as well as gendered; as Susan
expansion. Flags and national anthems are often associated with war.

Jeffords notes, all the heroes in Hollywoods 1980s Vietnam War and action-adventure films were white men.67
Rarely do war stories include stories about women. The association between masculinity and war has been central

While the manliness of war is rarely denied, militaries

must work hard to turn men into soldiers, using misogynist training that is
thought necessary to teach men to fight. Importantly, such training depends on the
denigration of anything that could be considered feminine; to act like a soldier is not to be
womanly. Military manhood, or a type of heroic masculinity that goes
back to the Greeks, attracts recruits and maintains selfesteem in
institutions where subservience and obedience are the norm. 68 Another image of
a soldier is a just warrior, self-sacrificially protecting women, children, and
other vulnerable people. The notion that (young) males fight wars to
protect vulnerable groups, such as women and children, who cannot be
expected to protect themselves, has been an important motivator for the
recruitment of military forces. The concept of the protected is essential to the legitimation of
to feminist investigations.

violence; it has been an important myth that has sustained support for war and its legitimation for both women and

In wartime, the heroic, just warrior is sometimes contrasted with a

malignant, often racialized, masculinity attributed to the enemy that
serves as further justification for protection.69
men.

We must destroy gender hierarchies inherent in traditional IR

in order to solve violence.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication. Pg 60-61 {Shoell}

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 1991although 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

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
Middle East.

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.

Stewardship
The notion of stewardship entrenched by western hegemonic
governments entrenches managerialism.
Sutapa 12 Chattopadhyay researcher at UNU-Merit and Maastricht University If Not Eco-Socialism Now,
Then When? Infiltrating universities with eco-feminist & anarchist practices. Class War University; composing
resources for anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian movements on the terrain of universities and beyond.
http://classwaru.org/2012/07/05/if-not-eco-socialism-now-then-when-infiltrating-universities-with-eco-feministanarchist-practices/ {Shoell}
At present the economy of extraction can be better understood by analyzing the imperial regimes of rule[11],

western hegemonic constructs that all the third world

resource-rich nations support terrorism to which the notion of
stewardship[13] is applied, because the more civilized know best to run
[the] lives of the subordinate people[14]. For example, the American imperial ideology for
technologies of rule[12], and

Operation Iraqi Freedom, where freedom was understood as universally desirable, placed terrorism as the enemy
of all and Iraq was occupied for liberating the Iraqis from the monstrous rule of Saddam. If oil was not the main
exportable commodity then there would be no wars, conquest, and occupation of the land and the people.

Improvement of the lives of thousands of Iraqis or, more recently, freeing

Libya from Gaddafi, echoes Mills declaration that despotism is the
legitimate mode of government dealing with barbarians, provided the end
be their improvement[15].

Terrorism
The affs imperialist rhetoric towards countries housing terror
reifies the gendered construction of the nations housing terror
as feminized and vulnerable and the US as the masculinized
savior and justifies violent interventionism.
Oliver 5 Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Women's Studies at Vanderbilt
University, PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987, and taught in the Philosophy departments at
the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Stony Brook prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2005. Women as Weapons
of War, Colombia University Press. Pg 48 {Shoell}
In other contexts and historical periods (e.g., British colonialism in Egypt and India, French occupation of Algeria,
and republican reformers in the Ottoman Empire) feminist scholars have persuasively argued and forcefully

gender, sexual difference, and sexuality are essential

elements of nationalism and imperialism. For centuries, liberating women and
women's rights have been used as justifications for imperialist and
colonial missions that shore up notions of nation and homeland or
patriotism. These missions also have been associated with the normalization of sexuality
against the sexual deviance associated with those colonized from the
perspective of the colonizers or associated with the colonizers from the perspective of the
colonized (especially in Western imperialistic enterprises in countries identified with the Eastthe West
views the East as sexually repressive while the East views the West as
sexually promiscuous). Notions of nation and homeland have been
developed, propagated, and justified through gender, including gendered
metaphors of motherland and fatherland, or metaphors that feminized or
masculinized countries or territories, and gendered notions of citizens or
citizen-soldiers as masculine along with the feminization of those
colonized. Within the U.S. media most recently Afghanistan and Burma have been figured as feminine, as
demonstrated that

countries in need of liberation or as fledgling democracies in need of protection. 3 For example, as we have seen in
the last chapter, in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush refers to the mothers and daughters of
Afghanistan, not only appealing to family but also to an association between the country itself and femininity.

Recent rhetoric in the United States through which notions of nation,

patriotism, and homeland are formed continue to revolve around the
"question of woman." Specifically, the force of the discourses of freedom,
democracy, and security relies on the use of gender, sexual difference,
and sexualitydefined in terms of women's dressto construct a free,
democratic and secure West against an enslaved, theocratic and infirm
Islamic Middle East. The current discussion continues the oppositional
logic of imperialist discourses that pits "West" against "East," "civilized"
against "barbaric," "backward" against "progress," measuring these
qualities in terms of women and sexuality. For example, in his 9/11 anniversary speech in
2006, President Bush said that we are fighting a war against "a radical Islamic empire where women are prisoners
in their homes" and that this war is "a struggle for civilization" against "evil" Islamic extremists.

The aff position terrorist groups as monsters antithetical to

the stable, masculine western nation state and use this to
justify high-tech violence.
Oliver 5 Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Women's Studies at Vanderbilt
University, PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987, and taught in the Philosophy departments at
the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Stony Brook prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2005. Women as Weapons
of War, Colombia University Press. Pg 48 {Shoell}

In recent rhetoric, more than identifying a particular form of political violence, the label
"terrorist" connotes a psychopath who commits horrific violence beyond

the pale of human society and politics. 27 Terrorists are figured as monsters without any
human compassion or ethical values. To call an act a terrorist act, to call a person a
terrorist, to call an organization a terrorist group expels them from the
realm of the political into the realm of the pathological. There is "normal,"
"civilized" violence and then there is "abnormal," "sick," and "barbaric"
violence. But, as Ghassan Hage emphasizes, "we need to question that way we are
invited to uncritically think of a particular form of violence as 'the worst
possible kind of violence' merely by classifying it as 'terrorist/" The ways
that the classification "terrorist" is used normalize some forms of violence
and pathologize others. It thus becomes an inflammatory term that not
only describes a particular form of violence but also legitimates another
form of violence, namely the hightech warfare of Western militaries. Hage
maintains that "the struggle between states and opposing groups [is]: first, over the distribution of means of
violence and second, and more importantly, over the classification of the forms of violence in the world,

The fight operates on the material

level of the distribution of wealth, in particular high-tech weaponry, and
on the symbolic level in terms of who has the authority to define
legitimate force. "Legitimate" means legal; recently we have seen how the most powerful can
redefine what constitutes legitimate force by redefining torture and
international law. If it is simply a matter of the more powerful defining the terms of engagement, then it
particularly over what constitutes legitimate violence."28

is merely a case of "might makes right," and our virtuous stand is nothing more than posturing on the part of the

terrorist groups never call themselves

terrorists; rather they call themselves revolutionaries, rebels, martyrs,
nationalists, or freedom fighters. He claims that terrorism is a "violence of last resort" that in
powerful. Hage points out that what we call

many cases results from the will to resist colonial domination or foreign occupation in spite of a lack of resources or
high-tech weaponry. He quotes a Palestinian Australian saying, "Let the Americans give us the monopoly over
nuclear power in the region and the strongest army there is, and we are happy to do 'incursions' and hunt down
wanted Israeli terrorists by demolishing their houses and 'accidentally' killing civilians. Who would want to be a
suicide bomber if such a luxurious mode of fighting is available to us?"29 Part of the struggle, then, is precisely
over who will have and who won't have access to "luxurious" high-tech weaponry. Those that do have access, the
wealthy nations, have not only the military might to physically force their case but also the symbolic capital to
define the terms of the struggle on an ideological level. They are in the position of power in terms of both the
weapons of war and the rhetoric of war. With high-tech weapons they can dominate the material landscape, but
with the power of rhetoric they can also dominate the symbolic landscape. They control and distribute both the

they
have the power not only to execute deadly force but also to justify it with
the rhetoric of saving civilization from barbarians, good versus evil,
humane versus monstrous, and legitimate versus illegitimate violence.
armaments of war and the ideology of war using hightech weaponry and high-tech media. This is to say,

Warmaking is justified by saving the feminine natural body

while maintaining its exclusion from politics.
Oliver 5 Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Women's Studies at Vanderbilt
University, PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987, and taught in the Philosophy departments at
the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Stony Brook prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2005. Women as Weapons
of War, Colombia University Press. Pg 48 {Shoell}
Yet what is most remarkable about these bare bodies is that they are not bare; they are not natural; they are not
innocent. Rather, they are armed and dangerous. They are, as Cavarero suggests, young mothers who become

What
is more dangerous than a natural body is a body that won't stay put, a
body that moves between nature and culture, a body become a political
statement. Indeed, what these women suicide bombers make manifest
that unsettles Western politics is the way in which the body is always
political; there is no bare body, no natural body. The greatest threat, then, is the
killers. In this regard, they are more than the return of the repressed natural body within Western politics.

ambiguity of the body as existing between nature and culture, between the physical and the technological. As we
have seen, in her analysis of the role of the body in metaphors of politicse.g., the "body politic"Cavarero shows

real flesh and blood bodies have been associated with women and
excluded from the realm of the properly political while properly political
how

bodies are seen as male bodies abstracted from everyday existence.

Western

polities' valuation of abstract or virtual bodies over the messiness of real ones is part and parcel of our

Our psychic and material financial investment in

technology, in this case high-tech weapons with which to defend our body
politic, both produces and reproduces the exclusion of real bodies from
the realm of politics. This is one reason the body appears as a threat to politics. Cavarero says,
"Bodies embedded, as instruments of lowtech level, in the system of hightechnology weaponry ... the body as such, the mere body transformed
into a moral weapon appears instead as totally irregular and, so to speak,
disloyal, illegitimate, treacherous. This doesn't dependas we often are
toldon the scandal of human beings who seem to neglect the value of
their individual lifein Italian history [and the history of the West in
general], for example, there are many cases of patriotic heroes, martyrs
of the nation, who immolate their life for the sake of the community. It
rather depends on the scandal of lethal weapons that consist of bare and
non-technological bodies."31 What is disloyal and treacherous about these bodies become weapons,
investment in advanced technologies.

however, is not merely the fact that they are bare and nontechnologicalthe exploding belt may be low-tech, but
it is still technology. Rather, alongside the threat of physical violence comes the threat of the explosion of
ambiguity onto the scene of meaning.

Construction of wars on terror perpetuate the domestic reign

of patriarchy.
Oliver 5 Kelly Oliver, W. Alton Jones Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Women's Studies at Vanderbilt
University, PhD in Philosophy from Northwestern University in 1987, and taught in the Philosophy departments at
the University of Texas at Austin and SUNY Stony Brook prior to coming to Vanderbilt in 2005. Women as Weapons
of War, Colombia University Press. Pg 48 {Shoell}

What the Good versus Evil, Us versus Them logic attempts to conceal is
the ambiguity at the heart of identity and subjectivity. Universal Principles are
defense mechanisms against this ambiguity that threatens the clean and proper borders of all identity. Once we
become beings who mean, animals who signify, we necessarily inhabit a world of ambiguity. The Good is a
tourniquet of sorts that attempts to stop the haemorrhaging of the animal into the human. It is the place where the
animal is sacrificed for the sake of the human;38 but, repressed and abjected animality always returns; and the
more violently it is repressed, the more violently it returns. The more forcefully the super-ego attempts to set up
defenses against ambiguity in order to protect the borders of identity, the more haunted the ego becomes.
Evil

and the Monstrous are nothing more than defenses against the
otherness within bodily drives and affects that hearken back to the
timelessness of animality. Even nowas the United States engages in a war
on terrorismin order to protect its (clean and proper, civilized) way of life
against those who harbour terrorists (monstrous, evil barbarians), this
projection of terrorists in Third World countries merely covers over the
existence of terrorism in our midst. We find out, for example, that the terrorists
have been trained in the United States or armed by operatives of the CIA
abroad; that they use our airplanes and technology to kill us, which of
course is what their rhetoric of the Evils of Western Culture or American
technology conceals. We are terrorized by the media and the governments constant warnings.
Moreover, and more importantly, we engage in killing and torture in the name of freedom, justice and democracy,

We use smart
weapons for surgical strikes to fight a clean war now called freedom
fighting and liberation, while they use dirty bombs for suicide attacks
that are called monstrous and evil and are seen as unnatural and
therefore (paradoxically) outside of the realm of the human. Fanons insight
regarding the rhetoric of terror in the context of the Algerian revolution couldnt be more relevant today: The
European nation that practices torture is a blighted nation, unfaithful to
its history. The underdeveloped nation that practices torture thereby
confirms its nature, plays the role of an underdeveloped people. If it does
which becomecliches that civilize violence in order to distinguish it from terrorism.

not wish to be morally condemned by the Western nations, an

underdeveloped nation is obligated to practice fair play, even while its
adversary ventures, with a clear conscience, into the unlimited
exploration of new means of terror.39 If they dont practice fair play as defined by the
dominant government or culture then they confirm their nature as deceitful, manipulative, cheaters and
criminals, or worse, unnatural pathological terrorists, monsters and evil. The ideal of fair play, then, is already
loaded such that those othered are defined as incapable of it.

The fight against terrorism is a fight against the uncivilized,

irrational dangerthis 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 GenderSecurity 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

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
these people. 63

inferiority. This dichotomous relationship is replicated in political discourses as well as in academic and literary

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
circles.

seen as an attempt to foretell the coming war and to persuade people of the necessity of using force against alQaeda 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 subordinate

contributing to the constructing of the hegemonic

masculinity of American men. The special registration requirements for the National Security
this inferior masculinity,

Entry-Exit System is evidence of the gendered 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

hegemonic masculinity, which differentiates

American men as superior to men in the Middle East. The special registration requires
maintenance of the current articulation of

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

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
outlier, North Korea, be interviewed and have their whereabouts tracked by the INS.66 These persons

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

people
seeking asylum from thirty-three countries, mostly in the Middle East, 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.
without access to attorneys or proper food.67 The INS has also recently changed its policy on asylum, as

Traditional IR
IR privileges the masculine over the feminine, women get pushed to
the sidelines and domestic issues

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 1, p. 22- 23, AO)

International politics is a mans world, a world of power and conflict in which

warfare is a privileged activity. Traditionally, diplomacy, military service, and the
science of international politics have been largely male domains . In the past, women
have rarely been included in the ranks of professional diplomats or the military:
of the relatively few women who specialize in the academic discipline of
international relations, few are security specialists. Women political scientists
who do international relations tend to focus on areas such as international
political economy, North- South relations, and matters of distributive justice .2 In the
United States, where women are entering the military and the foreign service in greater
numbers than ever before, rarely are they to be found in positions of military
leadership or at the top of the foreign policy establishment .3 One notable
exception, Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was US ambassador to the United Nations in the early 1980s, described herself
as a mouse in a mans world. For in spite of her authoritative and forceful public style and strong conservative credentials,

maintained that she failed to win the respect or attention of her male
colleagues on matters of foreign policy (Crapol 1987, 167). Kirkpatricks story could serve
to illustrate the discrimination that women often encounter when they rise to
high political office. However, the doubts as to whether a woman would be strong
enough to press the nuclear button (an issue raised when a tearful Patricia Schroeder was pictured sobbing on
her husbands shoulder as she bowed out of the 1988 US presidential race ) suggest that there may be an even
more fundamental barrier to womens entry into the highest ranks of the military
or of foreign policy-making. Nuclear strategy, with its vocabulary of power, threat,
force, and deterrence, has a distinctly masculine ring ;4 moreover, women are
stereotypically judged to be lacking in qualities that these terms evoke. It has also been
suggested that, although more women are entering the world of public policy, they are
more comfortable dealing with domestic issues such as social welfare that are
more compatible with their nurturing skills. Yet the large number of women in the
ranks of the peace movement suggests that women are not uninterested in issues
of war and peace, although their frequent dissent from national security policy
has often branded them as naive, uninformed, or even unpatriotic.
Kirkpatrick

Squo IR relies on the political man, the feminine is disregarded

Tickner 14 (J. Ann,

feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in residence

at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined after fifteen
years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as president
of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female president of the
ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford University Press, A
Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 1, p. 25, AO)

The need for control has been an important motivating force for modern realism . To
begin his search for an objective, rational theory of international politics, which could impose order on a chaotic and conflictual
world,

Morgenthau constructs an abstraction that he calls political man, a beast

completely lacking in moral restraints. Morgenthau is deeply aware that real man,
like real states, is both moral and bestial but, because states do not live up to the
universal moral laws that govern the universe, those who behave morally in
international politics are doomed to failure because of the immoral actions of
others. To solve this tension, Morgenthau postulates a realm of international
politics in which the amoral behavior of political man is not only permissible but

prudent. It is a Hobbesian world, separate and distinct from the world of domestic
order, in which states may act like beasts, for survival depends on a maximization
of power and a willingness to fight. Having long argued that the personal is political, most feminist theory
would reject the validity of constructing an autonomous political sphere around which boundaries of permissible modes of conduct
have been drawn. As Keller maintains,

the demarcation between public and private not only

defines and defends the boundaries of the political but also helps form its content
and style (Keller 1985, 9). Morgenthaus political man is a social construct that is based
on a partial representation of human nature. One might well ask where the
women were in Hobbess state of nature; presumably they must have been
involved in reproduction and child rearing, rather than warfare, if life was to go
on for more than one generation (Ketchum 1980). Morgenthaus emphasis on the conflictual aspects of the
international system contributes to a tendency, shared by other realists, to de-emphasize elements of cooperation and regeneration
which are also aspects of international relations.

Scientific understandings of IR ignore the personal effect that

policy has.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg. 2 {Shoell}
The title of this introduction, Gendering World Politics, both reflects some of these changes and conceptualizes a

While international relations has

never been just about relations between states, an IR statist focus seems
even less justified today than in the past. International politics cannot be
restricted to politics between states; politics is involved in relationships
between international organizations, social movements and other
nonstate actors, transnational corporations and international finance, and
human-rights organizations, to name a few. Decrying the narrowness of ColdWar IR, Ken
worldview into which feminist approaches fit more comfortably.

Booth has suggested that the subject should be informed by what he calls a global moral science that entails
systematic enquiry into how humans might live together locally and globally in ways that promote individual and

the traditional
frame for IR, might be seen as the problem of world politics, not the
solution.3 Since women have been on the peripheries of power in most states, this broad conception of world
politics seems the most fitting disciplinary definition in which to frame feminist
approaches. Their investigations of politics from the micro to the global
level and from the personal to the international, as well as their analyses
as to how macro structures affect local groups and individuals, draw on a
broad definition of the political. Using explicitly normative analysis,
certain feminists have drawn attention to the injustices of hierarchical
social relations and the effects they have on human beings life chances.
Feminists have never been satisfied with the boundary constraints of
conventional IR.4 While women have always been players in international politics, often their voices have
collective emancipation in harmony with nature. He goes on to suggest that the state,

not been heard either in policy arenas or in the discipline that analyzes them. If the agenda of concerns for IR

The scientific rationalistic

tradition,5 associated with both neorealism and neoliberalism, is being challenged by scholars in
scholars has expanded, so too have the theoretical approaches.

critical and postpositivist approaches that grow out of humanistic and philosophical traditions of knowledge rather
than those based on the natural Gendering World Politics 3 sciences. While certain scholars applaud this flowering
of a multiplicity of approaches and epistemologies, others see a discipline in disarray with fragmentation and
pluralism as its essential characteristics. Kalevi Holstis claim, in the early 1990s, that there is no longer agreement
on what constitutes reliable or useful knowledge and how to create it still holds true today.7 It is in the context of
this intellectual pluralism and disciplinary ferment that feminist approaches have entered the discipline.

War
War is our go-to metaphor, it has been normalized in society.
This has a ripple effect on gender construction and gender
roles as a whole.
Eisenstein 08 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written
feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 29-30, AO) ***Fuego***

War is our cultural metaphor. We war on drugs, on AIDS, on cancer, on

poverty, on terrorism. But war as metaphor obfuscates. Its language is
as deceptive as its end goals. War is a danger to democracy because it
justifies and therefore normalizes secrecy, deception, surveillance, and
killing. This mentality of war spills out into everyday life. The games our
children play naturalize war at home while US troops in Iraq use these
games for training and relaxation. The popular video games console PlayStation is a
recruiting tool one thinks one can play with war, be in war and have fun,
be warlike and win (Thompson 2004: 337). Meanwhile, in real life, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida,
brother of President George W. Bush, supports the use of a computer cyber-matrix
program that has marked thousands of citizens as potential terrorists
(Defede 2004: 24). US feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe writes of militarization as a process that impacts on and

The actual military is only a small, even

if central, aspect of this disciplining and regulating of social relations.
Hierarchy, surveillance, authoritarianism, and deference become a part of
the way people live both inside and outside military barracks (Enloe 2000: 3, 4).
pervades everyday life, from the site of the military.

US Homeland Security defines civilian psyches in militarist fashion. Its security alerts Code Orange and Code Red

They authorize the need for a security

state; a war of a different sort the kind you might not see, or feel first
hand, but which is there. The 2004 US presidential election was embedded in these militarist frames:
demand a kind of unconscious consciousness of fear.

calling forth particular memories of the Vietnam War to construct the new heroes and patriots of today. Enloe

militarized culture mystifies its own significance by focusing on

the military as the location for militarized ways of thinking/ living. She argues
that by focusing on the military as the site of warlike life we normalize the
militarized civilian sites. She insightfully argues that the newest way that
militarization is camouflaged is by presenting womens service in the
military as though it were connected to womens liberation (ibid.: 45). Instead of
liberation, womens entry into the military is better understood as the newest
stage of militarizing global capitalism. In this post-1989 era the constructions of racialized
patriarchy are being re-formed once again. New-old constructions of the dutiful wife, the
black mammy, the welfare mother, the soccer mom, the professional
woman, are being refashioned for and with militarization. More women are
forced to join the military out of economic necessity; and more nonmilitary women have been disciplined by the demands of a privatized
public sphere that restructures gender with its intensified demands.
worries that

War is integral to constructions of gender, multiple warrants

Riley et. Al 08 (Robin L. (Assistant Professor of Womens Studies at Syracuse University. She is coeditor with Naeem Inayatullah of Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War (2006).),
Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Professor of Womens Studies and Deans Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse
University. Her most recent book is Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003).),
and Minnie Bruce Pratt (Professor of Womens and Gender Studies at Syracuse University; a co-author of Yours in
Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (1984); and an organizer with the National
Womens Fightback Network.), Introduction, p.5-6, AO)

Women of many races, ethnicities, nationalities, and religions around the

world in various geographic spaces, social and cultural contexts; as partners, wives, sisters, daughters,
mothers, mourners, and victims experience war. Their experience of war and their
participation in it, either as actors or resisters, victims or perpetrators, cheerleaders or critics, are
always influenced by the construction of gender operating in and around
their lives. Notions about the proper practice of femininity have a
profound impact on how women are regarded in relation to war, what they
are expected to do, and the strength of the repercussions suffered for
acting outside the accepted boundaries of femininity operating within
particular spaces. Ideas about femininity and femaleness are also
exploited to determine how women from opposing sides will be treated
often used as a means of warfare. While constructions of masculinity and
femininity are always circulating in and around militarism and war,
womens bodies are sometimes primary considerations for military and
state leaders who ask: Are there enough female bodies to fill the ranks of
male-decimated militaries? How many female bodies must one side kill, rape, or impregnate in order
to demoralize the other? What will the presence of womens bodies inside militaries mean for the practice of

How will these bodies influence morale?

When women take their bodies into the streets to protest against war,
what does this mean for societies ideas about armed conflict, about
femininity, about motherhood? For feminist theorists and activists considering US-propagated wars,
there are counter-questions to ask: What are the implications of a US
imperial state laying claim to womens liberation? What is the relation
between this claim and resulting US foreign policy and military action? Did
US intervention and invasion in fact result in liberation for women in
Afghanistan and Iraq? What multiple meanings are embedded in the
phrase womens liberation? In her essay, Zillah Eisenstein says that US imperial democracy
maleness and masculinity within such institutions?

mainstreams womens rights discourse into foreign policy and militarizes women for imperial goals. Shahnaz Khan
gives an invaluable history of US intervention in Afghanistan long before the beginning of the 2001 war re-enacting
colonial rescue, while Isis Nusair, Elizabeth Philipose, and Patricia McFadden expose the ethnocentrism, racism,
and imperialist nationalism embedded in US foreign, judicial, and military policy. How are the multiple meanings of
womens liberation connected to the specifics of religion, culture, history, nation within the current US conflicts?
What is the relation between the lives of Afghan and Iraqi women before and after the US invasion, and that of
women living in the USA? How do USA-based women who define themselves as feminists take the states claim into

LeiLani Dowell asserts the connections

between women within and outside US borders: We can look to the
situation for women in the United States to answer the question of
whether or not to believe the US governments claim that it wages war in
other countries to liberate women. Cynthia Enloe and Patricia McFadden caution us about the
account in current theory and organizing? In her essay

ideological mobilization of motherhood during wartime. While Enloe warns against US military recruiters appealing
to mothers as patriots, McFadden warns women activists that motherhood is a slippery slope to conservatism, and
calls for feminists to rethink our analyses of motherhood and militarism. Recalling the description of Cindy Sheehan
as an activist mother, McFadden argues: An uncritical embrace of the notion of motherhood is not only dangerous
for feminist values and achievements, but it can also easily distract us from the less intimate issues of militarism
and state impunity, particularly when such practices are deployed against those who are not our kin or social
counterparts.

War is always already gendered, the winner is remasculinized

while the loser is masculinized
Eisenstein 08 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written
feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 36-38, AO)

The Iraq wars from 1991 to 2006 have been an expression of rehabilitating the
post-Vietnam US military through a resexing of it. In part femininity has been
militarized while the military has not been demasculinized. The story of US
army private Jessica Lynchs capture by the fedayeen in Nasiriyah was used

to mobilize US male soldiers to action. They would find her and protect
her (Bragg 2003: 124). Jessica Lynch, along with her maintenance company fellow
soldiers Lori Piestewa and Shoshanna Johnson, represented the shifting sexual and racial
make-up of the US military. Of the three, only Lynch was white, while all
three were working-class and female. They remained gendered as women
while being militarized like men. These young females were in harms way. Both Lynch and
Johnson came home with serious injuries. Piestewa a single mom died. The Iraq war of 2002 was
initiated by a Texas cowboy President George W. Bush with no military record to
speak of, while women at home in the USA face a refeminization be it
liposuction or a remake of The Stepford Wives in their everyday lives . In
2005, the film Brokeback Mountain, about a relationship between two actual cowboys, was a
hit. Now even cowboys can be gay. The gender confusion is real. Global
capitalism requires a rearticulation and regendering of patriarchy. This
involves a use of class differentiation among women to affirm masculinist
privilege across class lines. And working-class women, especially women of color, are most often the
new masculinist warriors. As class differences exacerbate inequality and injustice
globally these class realities are written into the militarization of
gendering everyday life. Rape articulates the violence encoded in gender;
in wartime it reinscribes the continuity of gender inscription of woman as
victim rather than actor. Yet enemies, male or female, are also feminized in
this process. Rape in Bosnia or Darfur sexually violates girls and women while attacking the gendered
system of masculinity. Men are demasculinized by the rape of their daughters or
wives. Everyone is shamed in this process. Rape is war in brutal, torturous
form, not simply wars effect, or its crime. As such, the female body is the
battlefield. Womens bodies are appropriated, conquered and destroyed.
War rape smashes all distinction between private and public life. It
destroys the ownership and privacy of ones body as individual lives are
destroyed as barter in gendered wars. There are no civilians left. It disallows
the mapping of a civilian status in war or the confinement of torture to a context that is disconnected from home
and family (Youngs 2003: 1209).

is remasculinized.

The enemy nation is demasculinized while the victor

Systematic rape policy as a murderous misogyny often exists as integral to

military policy (Allen 1996: 47, 62). There have been different forms of this process: the sexual slavery of Jewish
women for Nazi soldiers, the enforced institutionalized rape of comfort women by the Japanese army in World War
II, the genocidal Serb rape camps of the Bosnian war, the rape and mutilation of Tutsi women in the Rwandan
massacres, sometimes initiated by Hutu females themselves. Over 500,000 girls and women were raped in the
1994 Rwandan genocide. Tens of thousands of girls and women have been raped in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and East
Timor. In many of these countries, as in Serbia and Pakistan, a raped woman will be shunned by her community,
and suicide is often thought to be her only avenue of escape. Despite this stigma and shaming, in Sierra Leone war
rape was so common that rape survivors were allowed back into their communities despite all else (McKay and
Mazurana 2004: 45).

War is a paradox in the status quo, militarism as permeated all

aspects of life without our knowledge
Eisenstein 08 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written
feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 27-29, AO)

War bespeaks exceptional circumstances and is also naturalized as part of

the human condition: there will always be war(s). War is then awful and
normal; universal and yet unique. Each war is both similar and different to
a previous one; it is both changed and static. The Vietnam War is different than the Afghan
and Iraq wars, and not. Each war is defined by and defines anew its racialized
gender power relations. And these power relations are defined by early
global capitalism and anti-communism toward Vietnam, and US unipolar
capitalism and antiterrorist rhetoric toward Afghanistan and Iraq. More

than a quarter-century of US feminist activism partly initiated by the

Vietnam War defines new trajectories today. Sexual politics and the
sexual/racial/gender systems of violence have new exposure and visibility because
militarism and militarization redefine both masculinism and femininity,
alongside a hyper-sexuality and neo-racism that construct new-old
racialized gender formations. Although womens bodies that birth have also always been maimed
in war, todays wars make this more complex with more females as actors in
war. The newest technologies of war, alongside feminist activism and the
demands of global capital, de-essentialize and de-naturalize the earth
mother. I am therefore focused on the resexing of gender in the past quartercentury to better understand this
stage of highly militarized global capital. Post-1989, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the revolutions in eastern

The start of the Gulf Wars in 1991

solidified the militarist phase of US global power: more surveillance, more
privatization, more concentration of power, more military expenditure.
September 11 2001 authorized this militarism in its heightened form and
began the slide from neoliberal to fascistic democracy. With the
rejustification of this militarized frame be it the growth of prison facilities or the activation of
Europe, ushered in this stage of US unipolar power.

the National Guard and reserve units or declaring Code Orange and red alerts for the civilian population

racialized gendered configurations are being rearticulated in established

but revisionist form. A culture of pre-emptive strikes and unilateral power
plays out on both the battlefield and everyday life in the USA . An aggressive selfabsorption justifies a heightened individualism on the part of most successful people. And our leaders
think they do not need to heed international law that defends against
torture, or need to sign treaties to help protect the environment. The USA
controlled 32 percent of the world trade in weapons in 1987; and in 1997 controlled 43 percent. And, of the 140
nations it gave or sold arms to in 1995, 90 percent did not have democratic elections or were known for human

The USA has the most advanced arsenal on the face

of the earth and is becoming more and more conditioned by a military
style of discipline because of this. The presence of our military at home
and abroad is too significant to not affect the very culture that surrounds
and is Resexing militarism for the globe surrounded by it. The USA spent
more on its military $329 billion in 2002 than China, Russia, Japan, Iraq,
North Korea, and all other NATO countries combined (Baker 2003: 3546). The USA
also spends greater amounts on its prisons much more than it does on
its schools. There was an 81 percent increase in the number of prisons from 1990 to 2000. Sociologist C. W.
rights abuses (Kolko 1994: 111).

Millss military-industrial complex is now termed a prison-industrial complex by Angela Davis. She states that there
are at present more women in prison in California than there were women in prison in the whole country in the
1970s. In 2003 there were approximately two million prisoners in the USA and about one and a half million people
in the military (Davis 2003: 88, 92). Our militarized culture spends 52 percent of the federal budget on the military
and 6 percent on health (ibid.: 24, 27).

War as an Event
The affirmative sees war as a single event, ignores broader
structures of militarism that are omnipresent in society.
Cuomo 96 (Chris J., She is a Professor of Philosophy and Womens Studies at the University of Georgia and
a totally rad human, War is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence, Hypatia, Vol.
11, No. 4 Women and Violence (Autumn, 1996), accessed via JSTOR, p. 30-32, AO)

attention to war has typically appeared in the form of justifications

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 typically
marked by formal, institutional declarations. As happenings, wars and military activities can be
Philosophical

seen as motivated by identifiable, if complex, intentions, and directly enacted by individual and collective decision-

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
makers and agents of states. But

oppressed groups; how military violence shapes gendered, 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

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 post modem
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 event based conception of war inadequate,
especially insofar as gender is taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her
institutions and hegemonies-cannot be adequately pursued by focusing on events. These issues

argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on events are impoverished in a number of ways, and

feminist consideration of the political, ethical, and ontological

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
therefore

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

Theory that does not investigate or even notice the

omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the depth and
specificity of the everyday 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
postcolonial circumstances.

violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among
the constant presence 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

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 crisis-based politics and
analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options,
for social problems.

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
declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and
complicitous in the general presence of global militarism . Seeing war as
necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to
the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening early 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 connections among phenomena like the "war on
drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded militaristic campaigns.

Declarations of war are just overdetermined eruptions of

militarism, its all around us
Cuomo 96 (Chris J., She is a Professor of Philosophy and Womens Studies at the University of Georgia and
a totally rad human, War is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence, Hypatia, Vol.
11, No. 4 Women and Violence (Autumn, 1996), accessed via JSTOR, p. 33, AO)

Just-war theory is a prominent example of a philosophical approach that rests on the assumption that wars
are isolated from everyday life and ethics. Such theory, as developed by St. Augustine, Thomas
Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius, and as articulated in contemporary dialogues
by many philosophers, including Michael Walzer (1977), Thomas Nagel (1974), and
Sheldon Cohen (1989), take the primary question concerning the ethics of
warfare to be about when to enter into military conflicts against other
states. They therefore take as a given the notion that war is an isolated,
definable event with clear boundaries. These boundaries are significant
because they distinguish the circumstances in which standard moral rules
and constraints, such as rules against murder and unprovoked violence,
no longer apply. Just-war theory assumes that war is a separate sphere of
human activity having its own ethical constraints and criteria and in doing
so it begs the question of whether or not war is a special kind of event, or
part of a pervasive presence in nearly all contemporary life. Because the
application of just-war principles is a matter of proper decision making on
the part of agents of the state, before wars occur, and before military

strikes are made, they assume that military initiatives are distinct events .
In fact, declarations of war are generally overdetermined escalations of
preexisting conditions . Just-war criteria cannot help evaluate military and related institutions,
including their peacetime practices and how these relate to wartime activities, so they cannot address
the ways in which armed conflicts between and among states emerge from
omnipresent, often violent, state militarism . The remarkable resemblances in some sectors
between states of peace and states of war remain completely untouched by theories that are only able to discuss

Applications of just-war
help create the illusion that the "problem of war" is being
addressed when the only considerations are the ethics of declaring wars
and of military violence within the boundaries of declarations of war and
peace. Though just-war considerations might theoretically help decision-makers avoid specific gross eruptions of
the ethics of starting and ending direct military conflicts between and among states.
criteria actually

military violence, the aspects of war which require the underlying presence of militarism and the direct effects of

There may be important decisions to be

made about when and how to fight war, but these must be considered in
terms of the many other aspects of contemporary war and militarism that
are significant to nonmilitary personnel, including women and nonhumans.
the omnipresence of militarism remain untouched.

Impacts

Domestic Violence
US Imperialism leads to an increase in domestic violence reducing presence in the region does not solve for the
atrocities committed nor does it do anything to hold soldiers
accountable.
Chew 8 (Huibin Amelia, Dr. Chew received her Ph.D in American studies and ethnicity from USC Dornsife and
is a Fulbright Scholar. Whats left? After imperial feminist hijackings, Feminism and War: Confronting US
Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, pgs 77-79)//JS

In Iraq in March 2006, fourteen-year-old Abeer Qassim was gang-raped

and murdered by US soldiers; her family and seven-year-old sister were
executed in the next room. Soon after, several other women publicly came forward, reporting gang
rapes by US-trained Iraqi police. Sadly, it took over three years of occupation to break
the media silence on atrocities that are truly the tip of the iceberg (Harding
2004; Shumway 2004). Imperialism enables foreign and indigenous patriarchies
to collude in aggravating womens oppression. Sexual violence, as well as
the trafficking of Iraqi women and girls, rose horrifically after the US
invasion, and continues unabated to this day .

While the initial rapes and abductions were

perpetrated largely by Iraqi men, the occupation forces disruption of security and disregard provided them with the
occasion its priority, after all, was to secure the oil. Moreover,

since at least 2005 the Pentagon

has armed, supported, and trained death squad-style militias in Iraq,

known to use sexual violence and targeted femicide as tactics for
consolidating their power.

As the occupation persists, and contact between military forces and

civilians grows, sexual brutality directly at the hands of both US troops and Iraqi police under occupation authority

US readers may be surprised to learn that the Abu Ghraib

debacle, at the US prison in Baghdad, included the torture of female
detainees, as well a fact that went almost unreported in the US media . The
has proliferated.

first evidence of abuse was a letter from a female prisoner reporting gang rape (ibid.). Congress perused the photos
documenting such atrocities, but the only images widely disseminated involved male victims. The Pentagon and
government officials collaborated to prevent the other pictures public release, which should lead us to question
what the invisibility of women purchases.

The sexual abuse of female detainees is

widespread throughout Iraq, and well known among Iraqis yet we were
treated primarily to the spectacle of Lynddie England, a female US soldier,
participating in the Abu Ghraib tortures. The only pictures of US soldiers assaulting Iraqi
women to circulate were hard-core pornography images, later discredited as frauds. Thus, the rape of
women abounds in our consciousness, yet has no real existence. The
total number of detained women in Iraq is unknown; in 2005, Iman
Khamas of the International Occupation Watch Center reported 625
females in Al-Rusafah prison and 750 in Al-Kadhmiya alone, ranging from
age twelve to sixty (Susskind 2007). Women are subject to torture and
degrading humiliation; they are dragged by their hair, burned with
electricity, forced to eat from dirty toilets, and urinated on . According to Iraqi MP
Mohamed al-Dainey, there were sixty-five documented cases of womens rape in occupation detention centers
during 2006 (Zangana 2007). A May 2004 Red Cross report disclosed that 70 to 90 percent of 43,000 Iraqis
detained in the last year were arrested by mistake.

Today, US forces continue to routinely

imprison the female relatives and alleged lovers of male suspects for use
as hostages and bargaining chips a form of collective punishment . Over the
last year, detentions by multinational forces have increased drastically, by 40 percent (Zangana 2007); detention
centers number over 450, according to the US State Department.

Women are physically and

sexually abused at checkpoints and during house searches. After

brutalizing Iraqis, soldiers bring rape and domestic violence Whats left? 79 home.
Phoebe Jones of Global Womens Strike has traced a prison-military complex of abuse: torture in Abu Ghraib was

The
connection extends to both sides of the bars: in 1997, the number-one
reason for veterans being in jail was for sexual assault (Mackey 2004).
outsourced to personnel from US prison companies, while former soldiers return to become abusive guards.

Economic Equality
Feminist perspective key to economic justice, agriculture
improvement, and environmental conservation

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 3, p. 53-55, AO)

If a substantial portion of womens productive and reproductive activities takes

place on the peripheries of the world economy, in households or in subsistence
sectors, a feminist perspective must be concerned with achieving economic
justice in these particular contexts. Although agreeing that womens domestic
labor should be recognized as work, feminists caution that economic justice for
women in households cannot be guaranteed in the family, as it is presently
constituted. Although the family has been designated as the private sphere of women,
the concept of male head of household has ensured that male power has
traditionally been exercised in the private as well as the public realm . Feminist political
philosopher Susan Okin has argued that families are unjust to women or children as long
as women continue to bear a disproportionate share of childrearing, have lower
expected incomes than men, and are left with primary responsibility for
supporting and caring for children if families break up. Only when paid and
unpaid work, associated with both productive and reproductive labor, is shared
equally by men and women can the family be a just institution and one that can
provide the basis for a just society (Okin 1989, 171). As discussed above, Third World
development strategies have tended to ignore the subsistence sector, where
much of womens labor is being performed, with the result that economic
modernization has had a differential impact on men and women and has, in
certain instances, actually reduced the position of women. Due to the absence of
women from local and national power structures, development programs have
tended to support projects in areas of production that are dominated by men. To
achieve economic justice for rural women in the Third World, development must
target projects that benefit women, particularly in the subsistence sector .6
Improvements in agriculture should focus on consumption as well as production;
in many parts of Africa, gathering water and fuel, under conditions of increasing
scarcity and environmental degradation, are taking up larger portions of
womens time and energy. Because women are so centrally involved in basic
needs satisfaction in households and in the subsistence economy of the Third
World, a feminist approach to international political economy must be supportive
of a basic needs approach where basic needs are defined in terms of both
material needs and the need for autonomy and participation. Because, as I have argued,
Third World development strategies that are export oriented have tended to
contribute to domestic inequality and, in times of recession and increasing
international indebtedness, have had a particularly detrimental impact on women,
a strategy that seeks to satisfy basic needs within the domestic economy may be
the best type of strategy to improve the welfare of Third World women. Local
satisfaction of basic needs requires more attention to subsistence or domestic food production than to growing crops for export

A more self-reliant economy would also be less vulnerable to the decisions

of foreign investment whose employment policies can be particularly exploitative
of women. A basic needs strategy is compatible with values of nurturance and
caring; such a strategy is dependency reducing and can empower women to take
charge of their own lives and create conditions that increase their own security.
Women have generally been peripheral to the institutions of the nation-state and
markets.

transnational capital; therefore, a feminist perspective on international political

economy should take a critical stance with respect to these institutions , questioning
whether they are effectively able to deal with global problems of militarism, poverty, and the environment problems that
have a particularly negative impact on women. Building a model of political
economy that starts at the bottom, with the individual and the local satisfaction of the individuals basic needs,
envisages a type of state that is more self reliant with respect to the international system and
more able to live within its own resource limits. Such a state would be less militaristic
and give priority to welfare over military considerations .7 Looking at the world
economy from the perspective of those on the fringes of capitalism can help us to
think about constructing a model that would be concerned with the production of
life rather than the production of things and wealth . Maria Mies argues that the different
conception of labor upon which such a model depends could help us to adapt our
lifestyle at a time when we are becoming increasingly conscious of the finiteness
of the earth and its resources (Mies 1986, 211 ff.). Such a model would depend on an extended definition of
security, which goes beyond a nationalist, militarist focus and begins to speak to the economic and environmental security of
individuals and states alike. In their conclusion to The Global Political Economy, written one year after Glipins text, Stephen Gill and
David Law (1988) called for the formation of a counterhegemonic perspective on IPE, one based on an alternative set of concepts
and concerns, which could deal with a series of problems associated with militarism, environmental crises, and the excesses and

such a
perspective might emerge out of transnational linkages between grassroots social
movements concerned with peace, ecology, and economic justice (Gill and Law 1988; see
also Gill and Law 1989). Because women are represented in much larger numbers in these
new social movements than they are in institutions of state power and
transnational capital, women would be in a position to make a significant
contribution to the formation of this counterhegemonic perspective . Some feminists have
argued that womens position outside the structures of power, on the peripheries of
the system, gives them a special epistemological standpoint, which can provide a
more comprehensive view of reality. At a time when existing political and economic institutions seem
increasingly incapable of solving many global problems, a feminist perspective, by going beyond an investigation of
market relations, state behavior, and capitalism, could help us to understand how the global
economy affects those on the fringes of the market, the state, or in households as
we attempt to build a more secure world where inequalities based on gender and
other forms of discrimination are eliminated.
inequalities of the marketplace that are becoming more acute as we enter the twenty-first century. They suggest that

Extinction
Sexism is the cause of all proliferation, environmental
destruction, domestic violence, and war.
Warren & Cady 94 (Karen J, Duane L, feminists &authors, Hypatia, Feminism and Peace: Seeing
connections, pg 16-17)
Much of the current "unmanageability" of contemporary life in patriarchal societies,
(d), is then viewed as a consequence of a patriarchal preoccupation with activities, events, and experiences that

reflect historically male-gender identified beliefs, values, attitudes, and assumptions.

Included among these real-life consequences are precisely those concerns with nuclear
proliferation, war, environmental destruction, and violence toward women,
which many feminists see as the logical outgrowth of patriarchal thinking. In fact, it is
often only through observing these dysfunctional behaviors -- the symptoms of dysfunctionality -- that one can truly
see that and how patriarchy serves to maintain and perpetuate them. When patriarchy is understood as a
dysfunctional system, this "unmanageability" can be seen for what it is -- as a predictable and thus logical
consequence of patriarchy. 11The

theme that global environmental crises, war, and

violence generally are predictable and logical consequences of sexism and
patriarchal culture is pervasive in ecofeminist literature (see Russell 1989 , 2). Ecofeminist Charlene

Spretnak, for instance, argues that "a militarism and warfare are continual features of a patriarchal society because

Acknowledging the
context of patriarchal conceptualizations that feed militarism is a first
step toward reducing their impact and preserving life on Earth" ( Spretnak
they reflect and instill patriarchal values and fulfill needs of such a system.

1989 , 54). Stated in terms of the foregoing model of patriarchy as a dysfunctional social system, the claims by
Spretnak and other feminists take on a clearer meaning: Patriarchal conceptual frameworks legitimate impaired
thinking (about women, national and regional conflict, the environment)

which is manifested in
behaviors which, if continued, will make life on earth difficult, if not
impossible. It is a stark message, but it is plausible. Its plausibility ties in understanding the conceptual roots
of various woman-nature-peace connections in regional, national, and global contexts.

The extreme logic of state sovereignty guarantees conflict in a

world of nuclear capabilities, violence, and oppression.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 47 {Shoell}

Yet imagining security divested of its statist connotations is problematic;

the institutions of state power are not withering away. As R. B. J. Walker has
claimed, the state is a political category in a way that the world or humanity is
not.44 The security of states dominates our understanding of what security
can be because other forms of political community have been rendered
unthinkable. Yet, as Walker goes on to say, given the dangers of nuclear
weapons, we are no longer able to survive in a world predicated on an
extreme logic of state sovereignty, nor one where war is an option for
system change. Therefore, we must revise our understanding of the
relationship between universality and particularity upon which a statist
concept of security has been constructed. Security must be analyzed in
terms of how contemporary insecurities are being created and by a
sensitivity to the way in which people are responding to insecurities by
reworking their understanding of how their own predicament fits into

broader structures of violence and oppression.45 Feministswith their

bottom-up approach to security, an ontology of social relations, and an
emancipatory agendaare beginning to undertake such reanalyses.

Patriarchy guarantees wars, ecocide, genocide, and extinction.

Nhanenge 7 Jytte Masters @ U South Africa, paper submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements for the
degree of master of arts in the subject Development Studies, Ecofeminsm: Towards Integrating The Concerns Of
Women, Poor People And Nature Into Development.

have political consequences. They protect the

Militarism, colonialism, racism, sexism,
capitalism and other pathological 'isms' of modernity get legitimacy from
the assumption that power relations and hierarchy are inevitably a part of
human society, due to man's inherent nature. Because when mankind by nature is
The

androcentric premises

also

ideological basis of exploitative relationships.

autonomous, competitive and violent (i.e. masculine) then coercion and hierarchical structures are necessary to
manage conflicts and maintain social order. In this way, the cooperative relationships such as those found among
some women and tribal cultures, are by a dualised definition unrealistic and utopian. (Birkeland 1995: 59). This
means that power relations are generated by universal scientific truths about human nature, rather than by political
and social debate. The consequence is that people cannot challenge the basis of the power structure because they
believe it is the scientific truth, so it cannot be otherwise. In this way ,

militarism is justified as
being unavoidable, regardless of its patent irrationality. Likewise, if the
scientific "truth" were that humans would always compete for a greater
share of resources, then the rational response to the environmental crisis
would seem to be "dog-eat-dog" survivalism. This creates a self-fulfilling
prophecy in which nature and community simply cannot survive. (Birkeland
1995: 59). This type of social and political power structure is kept in place by social policies. It is based on the
assumption that if the scientific method is applied to public policy then social planning can be done free from
normative values. However, according to Habermas (Reitzes 1993: 40) the scientific method only conceal pre-

existing, unreflected social interests and pre-scientific decisions. Consequently, also social scientists apply
the scientific characteristics of objectivity, value-freedom, rationality and quantifiability to social life. In this way,

assume they can unveil universal laws about social relations, which will
lead to true knowledge. Based on this, correct social policies can be formulated. Thus, social
processes are excluded, while scientific objective facts are included. Society is
they

assumed a static entity, where no changes are possible. By promoting a permanent character, social science
legitimizes the existing social order, while obscuring the relations of domination and subordination, which is keeping
the existing power relations inaccessible to analysis. The frozen order also makes it impossible to develop
alternative explanations about social reality. It prevents a historical and political understanding of reality and denies
the possibility for social transformation by human agency. The prevailing condition is seen as an unavoidable fact.

This implies that human beings are passive and that domination is a
natural force, for which no one is responsible. This permits the state freely to implement
laws and policies, which are controlling and coercive. These are seen as being correct, because they are based on
scientific facts made by scientific experts. One result is that the state, without consulting the public, engages in a
pathological pursuit of economic growth. Technology can be used to dominate societies or to enhance them. Thus

due to patriarchal
values infiltrated in the type of technology developed is meant to
dominate, oppress, exploit and kill. One reason is that patriarchal societies
identify masculinity with conquest. Thus any technical innovation will
continue to be a tool for more effective oppression and exploitation. The
both science and technology could have developed in a different direction. But

highest priority seems to be given to technology that destroys life. Modern societies are dominated by masculine
institutions and patriarchal ideologies. Their technologies prevailed in Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,

Patriarchal power has

brought us acid rain, global warming, military states, poverty and countless cases
of suffering. We have seen men whose power has caused them to lose all sense of reality, decency and
imagination, and we must fear such power. The ultimate result of unchecked patriarchy
will be ecological catastrophe and nuclear holocaust . Such actions are denial of
Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and in many other parts of the world.

wisdom. It is working against natural harmony and destroying the basis of existence. But as long as ordinary people
leave questions of technology to the "experts" we will continue the forward stampede. As long as economics focus
on technology and both are the focus of politics, we can leave none of them to experts. Ordinary people are often

more capable of taking a wider and more humanistic view than these experts. (Kelly 1990: 112-114; Eisler 1990:
3233; Schumacher 1993: 20, 126, 128, 130).

Human Rights Abuse

Securitizing logic creates global instability and human rights
abuses.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 48 {Shoell}

Critical-security studies challenges realism on both ontological and

epistemological grounds. Many of its adherents argue for a broader definition of security, linked to
justice and emancipation; a concept of security that starts with the individual allows for a global definition of
security that moves beyond hierarchical binary distinctions between order and anarchy and inside and outside.
Although not all critical-security scholars are willing to dispense with state-centric analysis, all agree that an

feminist
scholarship on security also employs a different ontology and
epistemology from conventional security studies. Reluctant to be
associated with either side of the realist/idealist debate , for reasons outlined in
chapter 1, and generally skeptical of rationalist, scientific claims to
universality and objectivity, most feminist scholarship on security is
compatible with the critical side of the third debate. Questioning the role
of states as adequate security providers, many feminists have adopted a
multidimensional, multilevel approach , similar to some of the efforts to broaden the definition
of security described above. Feminists commitment to the emancipatory goal of
ending womens subordination is consistent with a broad definition of
security that takes the individual, situated in broader social structures, as
its starting point. Feminists seek to understand how the security of individuals and groups is compromised
examination of states identities is crucial for understanding their security-seeking behavior. Most

by violence, both physical and structural, at all levels. Feminists generally share the view of other critical scholars
that culture and identity and interpretive bottom up modes of analysis are crucial for understanding security

They differ, however,

in that they adopt gender as a central category of analysis for
understanding how unequal social structures, particularly gender
hierarchies, negatively impact the security of individuals and groups.
Challenging the myth that wars are fought to protect women, children,
and others stereotypically viewed as vulnerable, feminists point to the
high level of civilian casualties in contemporary wars. Feminist scholarship
has been particularly concerned with what goes on during wars, especially
the impact of war on women and civilians more generally. Whereas
conventional security studies has tended to look at causes and
consequences of wars from a top-down, or structural, perspective,
feminists have generally taken a bottom-up approach, analyzing the
impact of war at the microlevel. By so doing, as well as adopting gender as a category of analysis,
feminists believe they can tell us something new about the causes of war that
is missing from both conventional and critical perspective s. By crossing what many
issues and that emancipatory visions of security must get beyond statist frameworks.

feminists believe to be mutually constitutive levels of analysis, we get a better understanding of the
interrelationship between all forms of violence and the extent to which unjust social relations, including gender

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 womens
hierarchies, contribute to insecurity, broadly defined. Claiming that

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.

Peacebuilding
Feminist IR key to more effective peace and coalition building,
multiple examples

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 1, p. 26 28, AO)
If

the way in which we describe reality has an effect on the ways we perceive and
act upon our environment, new perspectives might lead us to consider alternative
courses of action. With this in mind, I shall first examine two important concepts in international relations, power and
security, from a feminist perspective and then discuss some feminist approaches to conflict resolution. Morgenthaus
definition of power, the control of man over man, is typical of the way that power
is usually defined in international relations. Nancy Hartsock argues that this type of
power as domination has always been associated with masculinity since the
exercise of power has generally been a masculine activity; rarely have women
exercised legitimized power in the public domain. When women write about power they stress
energy, capacity, and potential, says Hartsock, and she notes that women theorists, even when they have
little else in common, offer similar definitions of power that differ substantially
from the understanding of power as domination (Hartsock 1983, 210). Hannah Arendt, frequently
cited by feminists writing about power, defines power as the human ability to act in concert, or
action that is taken in connection with others who share similar concerns (Arendt 1969,
44).11 This definition of power is similar to that of psychologist David McClellands portrayal of female power, which he describes as
shared rather than assertive (McClelland 1975, ch. 3). Jane Jaquette argues that ,

since women have had less

access to the instruments of coercion, women have been more apt to rely on
power as persuasion; she compares womens domestic activities to coalitionbuilding (Jaquette 1984, ch. 2). All of these writers are portraying power as a relationship
of mutual enablement. Tying her definition of female power to international
relations, Jaquette sees similarities between female strategies of persuasion and
strategies of small states operating from a position of weakness in the
international system. There are also examples of states behavior that contain
elements of the female strategy of coalition-building. One such example is the Southern African
Development Co-ordination Conference (SADCC) that is designed to build regional infrastructures
based on mutual cooperation and collective self-reliance in order to decrease
dependence on the South African economy. Another is the European Community,
which has had considerable success in building mutual cooperation in an area of
the world whose history would not predict such a course of events (Sylvester 1990). It is
rare, however, that cooperative outcomes in international relations are described
in these terms, though Karl Deutschs notion of pluralistic security communities might be one such example where power is
associated with building community (Deutsch 1957). I am not denying that power as domination is a pervasive reality in

there are also elements of cooperation in interstate

relations that tend to be obscured when power is seen solely as domination . Thinking
international relations, but sometimes

about power in this multidimensional sense may help us to think constructively about the potential for cooperation as well as
conflict, an aspect of international relations generally downplayed by realism. Redefining national security is another way in which

Traditionally in the West, the

concept of national security has been tied to military strength and its role in the
physical protection of the nation-state from external threats. Morgenthaus notion of
feminist theory could contribute to new thinking about international relations.12

defending the national interest in terms of power is consistent with this definition. But this traditional definition of national security

When advanced states are highly

interdependent, and rely on weapons whose effects would be equally devastating
to winners and losers alike, defending national security by relying on war as the
last resort no longer appears very useful. Moreover, if one thinks of security in NorthSouth rather than East-West terms, for a large portion of the worlds population,
security has as much to do with the satisfaction of basic material needs as with
military threats, According to Johan Galtungs notion of structural violence, the lowering of life
is partial at best in todays world (Azar and Moon 1984).

expectancy by virtue of where one happens to be born is a form of violence whose

effects can be as devastating as war (Galtung 1969). Basic needs satisfaction has a
great deal to do with women, but only recently have womens roles as providers
of basic needs, and in development more generally, become visible as important
components in devising development strategies.13 Traditionally, the development literature has
focused on aspects of the development process that are in the public sphere, are technologically complex, and are usually

Thinking about the role of women in development and the way in

which we can define development and basic needs satisfaction to be inclusive of
womens roles and needs are topics that deserve higher priority on the
international agenda. Typically, however, this is an area about which traditional international relations theory, with its
undertaken by men.

prioritizing of order over justice, has had very little to say.

Gender Violence
Womens bodies are constant limbo of invisibility and visibility,
treated as objects of war.
Riley et. Al 08 (Robin L. (Assistant Professor of Womens Studies at Syracuse University. She is coeditor with Naeem Inayatullah of Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War (2006).),
Chandra Talpade Mohanty (Professor of Womens Studies and Deans Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse
University. Her most recent book is Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (2003).),
and Minnie Bruce Pratt (Professor of Womens and Gender Studies at Syracuse University; a co-author of Yours in
Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (1984); and an organizer with the National
Womens Fightback Network.), Introduction, p. 7-9, AO)

Sometimes womens bodies

are hyper-visual focused on to be counted, battled over, and controlled.
Other times, views of the female body recede so that constructions of
femininity are more prominent in obscuring the motivations of militarized
masculinity, in providing ongoing means of justifi cation, or in shaming the enemy most egregiously.
Whether embodied or constructed as an ideal, women are forced to
endure wars in which their actions are constrained, their agency is
compromised, and their well-being is constantly threatened. Of course,
gendered bodies are also racialized bodies, and race as a concept is
profoundly signifi cant in the ways that womens bodies are made
visible/invisible. For instance, Berta Joubert-Cecis argument shows how US economic aggression through
In wartime, sometimes women are visible, sometimes they are not.

pro-capitalist, neoliberal policies like the 1993 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) has warlike
consequences for women in Latin America, who are rendered virtually invisible in those economic policies. Forced to
migrate to survive, the women, as immigrant women in the USA, experience the brunt of ramped-up Homeland
Security racist policies and surveillance against illegal immigrants. These US manipulations are attempts to justify,
strengthen, maintain, and extend imperialism by creating or emphasizing old divisions among people, between
states, and within ethnicities. In fact, ideas about the proper practice of femininity and ways to live as woman
have divided and still divide white women from women of color within the USA, and divide US women from Iraqi and

Nusair, in looking at US
government statements and documents, makes visible how orientalized
notions of difference and ideas about the other in the US imaginary
shape and legitimize the torture committed by soldiers at the US military
prison Abu Ghraib, in Baghdad. The struggle to accurately understand the
autonomous perspectives and actions of oppressed women, at the same
time that US imperialism attempts to manipulate information about and
perception of women, is a crucial goal of an emerging anti-imperialist
feminist front in the USA to which this volume contributes. In the Western
media, where one story about war gets told, women are portrayed as
helpless, and at the same time as essential to the US all-volunteer
military charged with carrying out the war. Expanding on this idea, Alyson Cole
analyzes the evolution of the notion of victimhood in the Bush war
machines justification of war. Cole argues persuasively that ideas of victimhood are
used as a motivator for war, to feminize terrorist men, and recuperate US
masculinity. Racialized gender and colonial discourses thus lie at the heart
of such constructions of victimhood. Certain women are used as icons as if
they represent all women of a certain identity, position, or profession . Jessica
Afghan women, and from other women around the world. Isis

Lynch is put forward to represent all US women soldiers, and Condoleezza Rice to represent all women of color in
the USA. Iraqi microbiologists Dr Rihab Rashid Taha al-Azawi and Dr Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash are vilified as Dr
Germ and Mrs Anthrax in the US press and are the most frequently named Iraqi women in US media, blamed for
the production of the weapons of mass destruction weapons that were never found. They are supposed to

Iraqi and Afghan women are put forward as both demons

and victims of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein. But the US
media rarely shows these women as actual victims or resisters of the US
war. Nadine Sinno analyzes a counter-narrative that Introduction 9 challenges dominant media representations,
represent all Iraqi women.

arguing that bloggers like Riverbend, a young Iraqi woman making web-blog entries since 2003, have been able to

As US wars proliferate,
increasingly some women volunteer for national military service, join
resistance movements and become suicide bombers, or do military
intelligence work. Other women duck bombs and dodge landmines, hide
from occupying troops, continue to nurture, send supplies, or sell their
bodies as recreation for male soldiers. Womens participation as US
soldiers in this war has expanded under the economic pressures of the
poverty draft, with a disproportionate risk of assault and death falling on
women of color, who were over 50 percent of US enlisted women in 2003
critically access and humanize the war for readers in the USA and Iraq.

(Manning 2005). The conversation between women-of color veterans Anuradha Kristina Bhagwati and Eli
PaintedCrow details the complex experiences of women within the US military and the connections between race,
militarism, Abu Ghraib, US culture, feminism, and peace. Yet the reality reflected in their lives has been obscured
by a continued emphasis in the US media and public debates that focuses only on womens need for protection or
their role as the supporter of male-instigated wars.

*TRIGGER WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT* Sexual assault is

another manifestation of war, the silencing of the other is vital
it the persistence of war. Only the alternative is able to fight
back against this.
Eisenstein 8 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written
feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 38-39, AO)

rape can be said to be a

form of war in yet another inhumane form an integral form of war rather
than an effect (Stiglmayer 1992; Eisenstein 1996). War and rape are both normalized as
though they are inevitable, almost biologically driven, as in the mythic
warriors state of nature. Yet bodily violation destroys established gendered
stereotypes. A violated female is no longer a woman that a man wishes to
lay claim to. In war rape females are reduced to their patriarchal definition
as a body vessel and also denied the status of a privileged womanhood. In
war rape the woman is totally occupied, which is the ultimate invasion
(Ensler 2005: 28). Although less acknowledged and less systemic, homosexual rape man on man
occurs, but is less publicized given the way it collides with established
notions of hetero-masculinity. Rape in war whether hetero- or
homosexual in form structures a regendering of gender. When raped, males
become womanlike or like a fag; they become feminized as helpless. In this instance, gender
floats from the biological body in horrific form. According to Yvette Abrams, one in two
If I build on military historian Clausewitz and cultural critic Foucault here,

females has been raped in South Africa owing to the institutionalization of violence, starting with slavery and
following with colonial wars. This violent sense of trauma underpins any possibility of viable politics today (Abrams
2005). And the more war-ravaged the globe becomes, the more necessary it is to recognize rape as politics in yet
another form. Nevertheless, General Musharraf of Pakistan speaks dismissively of the claims of Pakistani women in
fall 2005, saying that many of them make false or exaggerated claims of rape in order to get financial support and
visas from foreigners. He likened rape to a money-making thing if you want to go abroad. He does so despite the
publicity surrounding Mukhtar Mai, who was raped as an act of honor revenge on the orders of a village jurga in
2002; and the threats against Shazia Khalids life after she went public about her rape (Masood 2004: A3). Pakistani

Rape as war in
another form also exists much closer to home in the USA. Dozens of
servicewomen in the Persian Gulf area have claimed sexual assaults and
rape by their fellow troops. During 200204 there were over one hundred reports of sexual
misconduct in the Central Command area Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan (Schmitt 2004: A1). These sexual
assaults simultaneously construct these females as both the womanly
warrior and the womanly victim. The US military needs female recruits . This
feminists were outraged and demonstrated in the streets to make their counter-statement.

means that the military is becoming more female with approximately 14 percent of the army, 17 percent of the air
force and 13 percent of the navy now female. But military life still nurtures masculinist sexual predators (Raynor
1997: 2455). By 2004 at least thirty-seven servicewomen had sought sexual trauma counseling from civilian rape
crisis organizations after returning from war duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. Eighty-eight cases of sexual

misconduct were reported by the 60,000 women stationed in these areas (Herdy and Moffeit 2004: 23). Although
the now famous Jessica Lynch has no memory of sexual assault, Rick Bragg writes that she was probably tortured
and raped her medical report cites anal sexual assault (Bragg 2003: 95). The intraand transnational presence of
sexual humiliation and rape defines and constructs enemies, nations and their wars. Womens bodies become the
universalized representation of conquest while male bodies are both masculinized in victory and feminized in

The sexed body whether whole or maimed, male or female is

usually forgotten in war. Sometimes we are forced to remember . US army
defeat.

aviator Tammy Duckworth returned home as an amputee after losing both her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade.

Legs and arms are

shattered and blown off, vaginas are violated, people are blinded, psyches
are tortured by unforgiving nightmares and little is said of this. This
silencing of the racial, sexual and gendered body is vital to the
persistence of war.
After scouting the Tigris river in Iraq, she came home to run for public office in Illinois.

Alternative / Framework

Feminism 1st
Questions of method come first status quo empiricism
constructs an image of the world that it equates with truth.
This refactors women into sex objects.
MacKinnon 82 Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for
Theory Author(s): Catharine A. MacKinnon Reviewed work(s): Source: Signs, Vol. 7,
No. 3, Feminist Theory (Spring, 1982), pp. 515-544 Published by: The University of
Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173853 . Accessed:
10/11/2011 16:57 University of Michigan (Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law, 1989)
York University (Professor of Law, 19881989) various universities (Visiting
Professor, 19841988) University of Minnesota (Assistant Professor of Law, 1982
1984)
Through consciousness raising, women grasp the collective reality of women's condition
from within the perspective of that experience, not from outside it. The claim that
a sexual politics exists and is socially fundamental is grounded in the
claim of feminism to women's perspective, not from it. Its claim to women's
perspective is its claim to truth. In its account of itself, women's point of view
contains a duality analogous to that of the marxist proletariat : determined by the
reality the theory explodes, it thereby claims special access to that reality.51 Feminism
does not see its view as subjective, partial, or undetermined but as a critique of the
purported generality, disinterestedness, and universality of prior accounts. These have not been half
right but have invoked the wrong whole. Feminism not only challenges masculine
partiality but questions the universality imperative itself. Aperspectivity is revealed
as a strategy of male hegemony.52 "Representation of the world," de Beauvoir writes, "like the
world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view,
which they confuse with the absolute truth."53 The parallel between
representation and construction should be sustained: men create the world from
their own point of view, which then becomes the truth to be described. This is a
closed system, not anyone's confusion. Power to create the world from one's point
of view is power in its male form.54 The male epistemological stance, which
corresponds to the world it creates, is objectivity: the ostensibly noninvolved stance, the view from
a distance and from no particular perspective, apparently transparent to
its reality. It does not comprehend its own perspectivity, does not recognize what it
sees as subject like itself, or that the way it apprehends its world is a form of its subjugation and presupposes it.

The objectively knowable is object. Woman through male eyes is sex

object, that by which man knows himself at once as man and as subject.55 What is objectively known
corresponds to the world and can be verified by pointing to it (as science does) because the world itself is controlled

male power
extends beneath the representation of reality to its construction: it makes
women (as it were) and so verifies (makes true) who women "are" in its view,
simultaneously confirming its way of being and its vision of truth. that corresponds to this
is "the use of things to experience self."57 As a coerced pornography model put it, "You
do it, you do it, and you do it; then you become it. "58 The fetish speaks feminism.
Objectification makes sexuality a material reality of women's lives, not just a psychological, attitudinal, or
ideological one.59 It obliterates the mind/matter distinction that such a division is
premised upon. Like the value of a commodity, women's sexual desirability is
fetishized: it is made to appear a quality of the object itself, spontaneous and
inherent, independent of the social relation which creates it, uncontrolled by the force that requires it. It helps
if the object cooperates: hence, the vaginal orgasm;60 hence, faked orgasms
from the same point of view. Combining, like any form of power, legitimation with force,

altogether.61 Women's sexualness, like male prowess, is no less real for being mythic. It is embodied.

Commodities do have value, but only because value is a social property

arising from the totality of the same social relations which, unconscious of their determination, fetishize it. Women's
bodies possess no less real desirability-or, probably, desire. Sartre exemplifies the problem on the epistemological

if I desire a house, or a glass of water, or a woman's body, how could this body,
piece of property reside in my desire and how can my desire be
anything but the consciousness of these objects as desirable?"62 Indeed. Objectivity is the
level: "But

this glass, this

methodological stance of which objectification is the social process. Sexual objectification is the primary process of

It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with

enforcement, myth with reality. Man fucks woman; subject verb object . The distinction
between objectification and alienation is called into question by this analysis. Objectification in
marxist materialism is thought to be the foundation of human freedom, the work
process whereby a subject becomes embodied in products and
relationships.63 Alienation is the socially contingent distortion of that process, a reification of products and
relations which prevents them from being, and being seen as, dependent on human agency.64 But from the
point of view of the object, objectification is alienation . For women, there
is no distinction between objectification and alienation because women
have not authored objectifications, we have been them. Women have been
the nature, the matter, the acted upon, to be subdued by the acting subject seeking to embody
the subjection of women.

himself in the social world. Reification is not just an illusion to the reified; it is also their reality. The alienated who

To be man's
other is to be his thing. Similarly, the problem of how the object can know herself as such is the same
can only grasp self as other is no different from the object who can only grasp self as thing.

as how the alienated can know its own alienation. This, in turn, poses the problem of feminism's account of
women's consciousness. How can women, as created, "thingified in the head,"65 complicit in the body, see our
condition as such? In order to account for women's consciousness (much less propagate it) feminism must grasp
that male power produces the world before it distorts it. Women's acceptance of their condition
does not contradict its fundamental unacceptability if women have little choice but to become persons who freely
choose women's roles. For this reason, the reality of women's oppression is, finally, neither demonstrable nor
refutable empirically.

Until this is confronted on the level of method , criticism of

what exists can be undercut by pointing to the reality

to be criticized. Women's

bondage, degradation, damage, complicity, and inferiority together with the possibility of resistance, movement, or
exceptions-will operate as barriers to consciousness rather than as means of access to what women need to

Male power is real; it is just not what it claims to

be, namely, the only reality. Male power is a myth that makes itself true. What it is to raise
become conscious of in order to change.

consciousness is to confront male power in this duality: as total on one side and a delusion on the other. In

women learn they have learned that men are everything,

women their negation, but that the sexes are equal. The content of the
message is revealed true and false at the same time; in fact, each part reflects the
consciousness raising,

other transvalued. If "men are all, women their negation" is taken as social criticism rather than simple description,

Their chains
become visible, their inferiority-their inequality-a product of subjection and a mode of its
enforcement. Reciprocally, the moment it is seen that this-life as we know it-is not
equality, that the sexes are not socially equal, womanhood can no longer be defined in
terms of lack of maleness, as negativity. For the first time, the question of what a woman is seeks its
it becomes clear for the first time that women are men's equals, everywhere in chains.

ground in and of a world understood as neither of its making nor in its image, and finds, within a critical embrace of

Feminism
has unmasked maleness as a form of power that is both omnipotent and
nonexistent, an unreal thing with very real consequences.
woman's fractured and alien image, that world women have made and a vision of its wholeness.

Feminist Reformulations
The alternative is a feminist reformulation of realism

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 1, p. 30 31, AO)
In the first part of this chapter, I used feminist theory to develop a critique of Morgenthaus principles of political realism in order to
demonstrate how the theory and practice of international relations may exhibit a masculine bias. I then suggested some
contributions that feminist theory might make to reconceptualizing some important concepts in international relations and to

with a feminist
reformulation of Morgenthaus six principles of political realism , outlined earlier in this
thinking about a feminist epistemology. Drawing on these observations, I will now conclude

chapter, which might help us to begin to think differently about international relations. I shall not use the term realism, since
feminists believe that there are multiple realities: a truly realistic picture of international politics must recognize elements of
cooperation as well as conflict, morality as well as realpolitik, and the strivings for justice as well as order.16 This reformulation may

1. A feminist perspective believes that

objectivity, as it is culturally defined, is associated with masculinity. Therefore, supposedly
objective laws of human nature are based on a partial masculine view of human nature . Human nature is both
masculine and feminine: it contains elements of social reproduction and
development as well as political domination. Dynamic objectivity offers us a more
connected view of objectivity with less potential for domination. 2. A feminist perspective
believes that the national interest is multidimensional and contextually contingent .
Therefore it cannot be defined solely in terms of power. In the contemporary world, the national
interest demands cooperative rather than zero-sum solutions to a set of
interdependent global problems that include nuclear war, economic well-being,
and environmental degradation. 3. Power cannot be infused with meaning that is
universally valid. Power as domination and control privileges masculinity and
ignores the possibility of collective empowerment, another aspect of power often
associated with femininity. 4. A feminist perspective rejects the possibility of separating
moral command from political action. All political action has moral significance. The
help us begin to think in these multidimensional terms:

realist agenda for maximizing order through power and control prioritizes the moral command of order over those of justice and the

5. While recognizing that the moral

aspirations of particular nations cannot be equated with universal moral
principles, a feminist perspective seeks to find common moral elements in human
aspirations that could become the basis for de-escalating international conflict
and building international community. 6. A feminist perspective denies the validity of
the autonomy of the political. Since autonomy is associated with masculinity in
Western culture, disciplinary efforts to construct a worldview that does not rest
on a pluralistic conception of human nature, are partial and masculine. Building
boundaries around a narrowly defined political realm defines political in a way
that excludes the concerns and contributions of women. In constructing this feminist alternative, I
am not denying the validity of Morgenthaus work. Adding a feminist perspective to the epistemology
of international relations, however, is a stage through which we must pass if we
are to begin to think about constructing an ungendered or human science of
international politics which is sensitive to, but goes beyond, both masculine and
feminine perspectives. Such inclusionary thinking, which, as Simone de Beauvoir tells us, values
the bringing forth of life as much as the risking of life, is becoming imperative in a
world where the technology of war and a fragile natural environment are
threatening human existence. This ungendered or human discourse becomes
possible only when women are adequately represented in the discipline and when
there is equal respect for the contributions of both women and men alike.
satisfaction of basic needs necessary to ensure social reproduction.

Gendered binaries are social constructs not objective truth

criticizing assumptions of the world is a necessary starting
point of resistance
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 RelationsFeminist Perspectives On Achieving Global
Security]

celebration of male power, particularly the glorification of the male warrior, produces
more of a gender dichotomy than exists in reality for, as R. W. Connell points out, this
stereotypical image of masculinity does not fit most men. Connell
suggests that what he calls "hegemonic masculinity," a type of culturally
dominant masculinity that he distinguishes from other subordinated masculinities , is a socially
constructed cultural ideal that, while it does not correspond to the actual
personality of the majority of men, sustains patriarchal authority and
legitimizes a patriarchal political and social order. Hegemonic masculinity
is sustained through its opposition to various subordinated and devalued masculinities, such as
homosexuality, and, more important, through its relation to various devalued
femininities. Socially constructed gender differences are based on socially
sanctioned, unequal relationships between men and women that reinforce
compliance with men's stated superiority. Nowhere in the public realm are these
stereotypical gender images more apparent than in the realm of international
politics, where the characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity are projected onto the behavior of
This

states whose success as international actors is measured in terms of their power capabilities and capacity for selfhelp and autonomy. Connell's definition of hegemonic masculinity depends on its opposition to and unequal
relationship with various subordinated femininities. Many contemporary feminists draw on similarly socially
or engendered, relationships in their definition of gender difference. Historically,
differences between men and women have usually been ascribed to
biology. But when feminists use the term gender today, they are not
generally referring to biological differences between males and females,
but to a set of culturally shaped and defined characteristics associated
with masculinity and femininity. These characteristics can and do vary
across time and place. In this view, biology may constrain behavior, but it
should not be used "deterministically" or "naturally" to justify practices,
institutions, or choices that could be other than they are . While what it means to be
constructed,

a man or a woman varies across cultures and history, in most cultures gender differences signify relationships of
inequality and the domination of women by men. Joan Scott similarly characterizes gender as "a constitutive
element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and... a primary way of signifying
relationships of power." Indeed one could characterize most contemporary feminist scholarship in terms of the dual

gender difference has played an important and essential role in

the structuring of social inequalities in much of human history and that
the resulting differences in self-identifications, human understandings,
social status, and power relationships are unjustified. Scott claims that the way in
beliefs that

which our understanding of gender signifies relationships of power is through a set of normative concepts that set
forth interpretations of the meanings of symbols. In Western culture ,

these concepts take the form

of fixed binary oppositions that categorically assert the meaning of
masculine and feminine and hence legitimize a set of unequal social
relationships. Scott and many other contemporary feminists assert that, through our use of
language, we come to perceive the world through these binary
oppositions. Our Western understanding of gender is based on a set of
culturally determined binary distinctions, such as public versus private, objective versus
subjective, self versus other, reason versus emotion, autonomy versus relatedness, and culture versus
nature; the first of each pair of characteristics is typically associated with masculinity, the second with femininity.

the hierarchical construction of these distinctions can take on a

fixed and permanent quality that perpetuates women's oppression:
therefore they must be challenged. To do so we must analyze the way
Scott claims that

these binary oppositions operate in different contexts and, rather than

accepting them as fixed, seek to displace their hierarchical construction.
When many of these differences between women and men are no longer
assumed to be natural or fixed, we can examine how relations of gender
inequality are constructed and sustained in various arenas of public and
private life. In committing itself to gender as a category of analysis, contemporary feminism also commits
itself to gender equality as a social goal. Extending Scott's challenge to the field of international relations, we can
immediately detect a similar set of hierarchical binary oppositions. But in spite of the seemingly obvious association
of international politics with the masculine characteristics described above, the field of international relations is one
of the last of the social sciences to be touched by gender analysis and feminist perspectives. The reason for this, I
believe, is not that the field is gender neutral, meaning that the introduction of gender is irrelevant to its subject
matter as many scholars believe, but that it is so thoroughly masculinized that the workings of these hierarchical
gender relations are hidden. Framed in its own set of binary distinctions, the discipline of international relations
assumes similarly hierarchical relationships when it posits an anarchic world "outside" to be defended against
through the accumulation and rational use of power. In political discourse, this becomes translated into
stereotypical notions about those who inhabit the outside. Like women, foreigners are frequently portrayed as "the
other": nonwhites and tropical countries are often depicted as irrational, emotional, and unstable, characteristics

The construction of this discourse and the way in

which we are taught to think about international politics closely parallel
the way in which we are socialized into understanding gender differences.
To ignore these hierarchical constructions and their relevance to power is
therefore to risk perpetuating these relationships of domination and
subordination. But before beginning to describe what the field of international relations might look like if
that are also attributed to women.

gender were included as a central category of analysis, I shall give a brief historical overview of the field as it has
traditionally been constructed.

Systemic Critique
The alternative is to recognize the pattern of atrocities
committed by US soldiers and to unmask the systemic causes
behind them by engaging in a feminist analysis.
Chew 8 (Huibin Amelia, Dr. Chew received her Ph.D in American studies and ethnicity from USC Dornsife and
is a Fulbright Scholar. Whats left? After imperial feminist hijackings, Feminism and War: Confronting US
Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, pgs 79-80)//JS
Even after the grisly murders of Abeer and her family came to light, coverage in the US press repeatedly insulted
and devalued the victims humanity; headlines primarily directed attention toward the US attackers tears
(Hopkins 2007). Anti-war organizers cannot allow these acts to be treated as mere aberrations.

Only when

we are willing to recognize a pattern of atrocities can we unmask the

systemic causes behind them. We must oppose the hierarchy of lives that
glorifies rapists and murderers in US uniform and confront the forces
producing these behaviors. Women and queer people may serve as
soldiers, but the US military is a misogynist, homophobic institution that
relies on hetero-patriarchal ideologies and relations to function with farreaching effects within US society as well as occupied lands. The US
military conditions men to devalue, objectify and demean traits
traditionally associated with femininity, molding soldiers to adopt a role of
violent masculinity that glorifies domination. One soldier reported his training in boot
camp: Who are you? Killers! What do you do? We kill! We kill! We kill! Those viewed as
feminine or civilian are at best trophies to be protected, rather than
equals to be accountable to. Furthermore, soldiers are purposefully taught
to eroticize violence from a heterosexual, maleaggressor perspective.
During the first US Gulf War on Iraq in 1991, air force pilots watched
pornographic movies before bombing missions to psyche themselves up
(Rogin 1993). Internalizing a misogynist, violent sexuality becomes embedded
in soldiers training to function psychologically as killers. The widespread sexual
abuse of female soldiers by male colleagues, with overwhelming impunity, is a symptom of this institutions modus
operandi.

We must interrogate the use of sexual violence as a tool of war and

genocide as well as labor and domestic exploitation and how such

sadistic acts become customary.

Narratives
Narratives are the best way to disrupt normative construction
of IR, and are key to understanding lived experiences.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 142 {Shoell}
Christine Chins work also responds to the question, Where are the women? Chin presents her fieldwork with
domestic servants in Malaysia in a light similar to Moons. Describing her ethnographic researchwhich involved

rejects the
survey method, which in Chins view oversimplifies complexities of life that
cannot be distilled in a series of hypotheses to be tested. She describes
her work as multimethod ethnographic research: she offers quotations
from field notes that, she says, are a style of evidence that allows her
subjects to use their own words and speak about any issue they please.
Chin writes about her efforts to establish trust and describes her analysis
of her interviews as a study of narrativity, or how we come to construct
our identities by locating ourselves within our life stories. 44 Narrative is a
method sometimes employed by feminists to further their goal of
constructing knowledge that comes out of peoples everyday experiences.
Such knowledge is important for reaching a level of selfunderstanding
that can enable people to comprehend the hierarchical structures of
inequality or oppression within which their lives are situated, and thereby
move toward overcoming them. Laurel Richardson, a feminist sociologist, has claimed that
narratives are quintessential to understanding the sociological. She outlines
living in various neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, over a six-month period, she, too,

some of the consequences of adopting a narrative form as a way of acquiring and representing knowledge,

Narratives display
the goals and intentions of human actors and are the primary way that
individuals organize their experience into temporally meaningful episodes;
narratives make the connections between events that constitute meaning.
Explanation in a narrative mode is contextually embedded, whereas
scientific explanation is abstracted from spatial and temporal contexts. 45
Richardson describes narratives that give voice to those social groups who are
marginalizedto what she calls the collective story. While people talk of specific events
rather than articulating how sociological categories such as race, class,
and gender have shaped their lives, she believes that their stories have
transcendent possibilities for social action and societal transformation .46
suggesting that it can empower individuals and support transformative social projects.

Intersectionality Solvency
Military prostitution is a national and international security
issue.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 143 {Shoell}
While IR feminists have employed ethnographic methods, often with these emancipatory goals in mind, they are not

IR feminists provide
multilevel, mutually constituted constructions. Importantly, their
investigations link everyday experiences with wider regional and global
political and economic structures and processes. As discussed in chapter 2, Moons work
demonstrates that military prostitution is not simply a womens issue, but a
using ethnography only to narrate and understand peoples lives at the local level.

matter of national security and international politics . The challenge of her work is to
analyze the interaction between foreign governments and among governments and local groups.47 This type
of understanding may reveal possibilities for social change. Likewise, Chin uses a
neo-Gramscian perspective to demonstrate how domestic service is an issue that, rather
than being a personal, private one, as is often assumed, involves the state and its
international political and economic relations. Reinforcing the feminist claim of the
interpenetration of the personal and political, Chin investigates the multicausal linkages between region (in this
case, the East Asian region), state, and household. Although previous analyses have examined class and racial
dimensions of what she calls the repressive developmental state, little work has been done on its gendered

critical political-economy approach, one used by other feminists, too,

differs from rationalistic approaches in that it takes into account both the
material and ideational dimensions of social relations . Chin claims that a focus on
legislation is not sufficient to account for the repressive policies of the state; one must also examine
the ideological hegemony necessary to formulate and legitimate such
economic policies.49 As these empirical studies demonstrate, gender is a system of
meaning that comes to be expressed in legitimating discourses that keep
prevailing power structures in place. For this reason, feminists have also
been attracted to discourse analysis as a methodology.
dimensions.48 Chins

Education / Epistemology
Their intellectual framework for Western knowledge is
inherently masculine and excludes feminine voices. They will
never remedy the aff impact because effecting social change
must come from those who are impacted by the oppressive
structures not just policymakers.
Tickner 14 (J. Ann, Dr. Tickner received her Ph.D from Brandeis University and her MA from Yale University.
She works at American University as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence and is a Professor Emerita at the
University of Southern California. A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Oxford University Press, pgs
133-134)//JS
As discussed in more detail in earlier chapters, secular feminists have similar problems with the gendering of

Women have had an ambiguous and complicated relationship

with secular rationalism and objective reasoning that have been
foundations for modern knowledge, including social scientific knowledge .
secular knowledge.

For this reason, secular feminists have constructed useful critiques of the historical development of the kind of
secular rationalist thinking of which conservative religions are so critical and about which Morgenthau was so

Modern knowledge, with its claims to universality and objectivity,

has generally been constructed by men from knowledge of mens lives in
the public sphere. Mens historical roles as political and economic actors
pessimistic.

have provided the intellectual framework for Western knowledge about

politics and economics.

The separation of the public spheres, reinforced by the scientific revolution of

the seventeenth century, has resulted in the legitimation of what are perceived as the rational activities (such as
politics and economics) in the former while devaluing the natural activities (such as household management,
childrearing and caregiving) of the latter (Peterson 1992, 202).

Feminists argue that broadening

the base from which knowledge is constructedthat is, including the

experiences of womencan actually enhance objectivity (Harding 1991, 123).17
Modern knowledge depends on the Cartesian separation of the intellect
(valued in public sphere behavior) and the emotions (more acceptable in
the private sphere).18 These are hierarchically ordered and gendered,
where the mind is associated with men and emotions with women and
where, as Morgenthau claims, it is the task of (masculine) reason to tame
dangerous (female) emotions. Feminists believe that emotion and intellect
are mutually constitutive and sustaining, and that emotions can be a
positive as well as a negative force. Armstrong claims that, since the scientific revolution of the
seventeenth century, even Western theology has been characterized by inappropriate reliance on reason. This has
reinforced the tendency to impose dogmatic religious beliefs that are causing many of todays problems (Armstrong

rationality is contextual and emergent

out of social relations in which the individual is embedded. Contextualized
rationality, whereby the producer of knowledge is reflexive of her or his
role in the production of knowledge, is a more robust ideational
foundation from which to build less conflictual worldviews. Like feminist
2004, 294). As discussed in Part Two, for feminists,

theologians, many secular feminists also advocate a dialogic contextual model of knowledge-building whereby
knowledge emerges through conversations with texts and subjects. For example, Brooke Ackerly has built on, but
goes beyond, democratic political theory in designing a deliberative democratic model of social criticism that she
defines as an ongoing process to bring about incremental un-coerced models of social change (Ackerly 2000, 14).

Ackerly constructed a framework

that combines scholarship with action. She argues that effecting social
Working with rural women and social activists in Bangladesh,

change in social, political, and economic institutions must come, not just

from theorists, but also from the experiences of those whose lives are
impacted by injustices that they seek to remedy . Participants in such a
dialogue are not theorists or elites but ordinary individuals who must have
mutual respect and equal ability to influence outcomes. Analogous to processes used
by liberation theologians, Ackerly recounted meetings among rural women and social activists who used stories,
analogies, and emotions in non-institutionalized settings to construct better understandings of their situations in

Building knowledge through an interactive dialogic process

that includes multiple voices, rather than constructing knowledge aimed
at discovering some objective universal truth, could provide a useful
foundation for the construction of less conflictual worldviews .19 Although not
order to change them.

specifically religious, such an approach could also contribute to bridging religious and secular divides.

IR is a form of privileged scholarship that operates under

structures of power that delegitimizes other forms of
scholarship like feminism.
Tickner 14 (J. Ann, Dr. Tickner received her Ph.D from Brandeis University and her MA from Yale University.
She works at American University as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence and is a Professor Emerita at the
University of Southern California. A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Oxford University Press, pgs
150-151)//JS
Observations on their own writings, such as those presented by the authors in Politics and Gender, go quite some
way in introducing a feminist sensibility into quantitative research and recognizing these epistemological issues;
they are an important contribution to this debate. However, Parisi and Apodacas observation that

knowledge is not neutral but situated in unequal structures of power is a

deep problem that is hard to solve. As I have emphasized throughout this book, feminists in all
disciplines have been acutely aware of the relationship between knowledge and power and the ways that

Feminist scholarship
emerged from a deep skepticism about knowledge that, while it claims to
be universal and objective, is, in reality, partial and subjective. Feminists
conventional knowledge has been constructed in the interests of the powerful.

have made unique contributions in drawing attention to unequal power structures, gendered, racial, or otherwise,

have also alerted

us to ways in which knowledge itself is complicit in legitimating these
that impact negatively on so many peoples livesboth women and men. Importantly, they

hierarchical structures the unequal terrain on which feminists attempt

to engage with social scientific research, and the lack of engagement, even
with other critical approaches noted by Georgina Waylen, are examples of this. And, as Marysia Zalewski claims,
power differentials in the discipline of international relations allow both mainstream and critical approaches to

The fact that the mainstream in any discipline rarely reflects on

these epistemological issues, or feels itself obliged to respond to calls for
conversations across these divides, is an indication of the power of
hegemonic knowledge structures. By studying issues not normally considered part of IR,
feminists have alerted us to the ways that certain subjects and issues
have been silenced through the drawing of these epistemological and
disciplinary boundaries. While it is up to each of us to choose our own
ignore gender.

methodological pathways, we should all be tolerant of non-conventional

methodologies that may be more suited to analyzing some of the
research questions that IR feminists have raised. New questions,
concepts, and definitions, and new modes of analysis are essential tools
for seeing beyond the ideological and epistemological boundaries that
drive global politics and inhibit our quest to understand them. Nevertheless, it

may be time to put aside these debates and pursue the many fruitful ways that IR feminists, however they define
themselves, are investigating oppressive power structures, both material and ideational, and seeking ways to
change them. The location from which we do our research, whether it is inside or outside what has been defined as
the discipline of IR, is for each of us to decide.

Discourse Key
Discourse is key, it determines what can and cannot be
discussed. Without deconstructing the hegemonic masculinity
of IR discourse we are doomed to repeat the atrocities of the
past.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 144-145 {Shoell}
Claiming that discourse analysis is an emerging research program in IR, Jennifer Milliken outlines its three

discourses are systems of signification in which

discourse is structured in terms of binary oppositions that establish
relations of power. As examples, she supplies terms such as modern/traditional, and
West/Third World that are not neutral but establish the first term as
superior to the second.50 Second, discourses define subjects authorized to
speak and to act; they also define knowledgeable practices by these
subjects, which makes certain practices legitimate and others not.
Discourses also produce publics or audiences for these actors; in this way,
social space comes to be organized and controlled. This works to restrict
experts to certain groups and to endorse a certain meaning of the way
things should be done, excluding others.51 Third, discourse analysis directs
us toward studying dominating or hegemonic discourses and the way they
are connected to the implementation and legitimation of certain practices.
But more fundamentally, discourse produces what we have come to understand in
theoretical commitments: First,

the world as common sense . Discourse analysis can also help us understand how such language
works and when the predominant forms of knowledge embodied in such discourses are unstable; this allows the
study of subjugated knowledge or alternative discourses that have been
silenced in the process.52 Focusing on subjugated knowledges may involve
an examination of how they work to create conditions for resistance to a
dominating discourse. Milliken claims that investigation of subjugated knowledge has the potential to
show how the world could be interpreted differently; she claims that, since it requires fieldwork, often in nonWestern-language environments, it is not a method that has been much used in IR. Nevertheless, some of the
ethnographic work of IR feminists that brings marginal voices to light (see above) and the kinds of challenges that
feminists are mounting to dominant discourses in development studies (discussed in chapter 3) demonstrate that
this type of research is being done by feminists. Not only have feminists investigated subjugated knowledges built
out of the lives of ordinary peoples everyday experiences, they have also examined dominant discourses, noting

legitimacy is created and sustained through types of

hegemonic masculinity (see chapter 1). Carol Cohn has described her analysis of strategic discourse
how frequently their

(discussed in chapter 2) as being transdisciplinary, using a methodology that combines textual cultural analysis and
grounded methods of qualitative sociology and ethnographic anthropology. Echoing Charlesworths metaphor of an
archaeological dig, Cohn talks of her methodology as the juxtaposition and layering of many different windows. Her
fieldwork with national-security elites allowed her to follow gender as metaphor and meaning system through the
multisited terrain of national security.53 As a participant observer of nationalsecurity elites, Cohn was studying
up rather than studying down, or doing anthropological research about those who shape our attitudes and
control institutional structures.54 Motivated by her claim that the power of language and professional discourse

Department of Defense
official reports, military documents, and media accounts to investigate
how national-security practices are shaped, limited and distorted by
gender.55 In these analyses, she asks how gender affects national-security
paradigms, policies, and practices. Assuming that reality is a social
construction available to us through language, Cohn has described her
shapes how and what people think, Cohn also used textual analysis of U.S.

research in terms that she compares to Barbara Mc- Clintockslearning,

listening, and finding out what is there without imposing preconditions
about subjects and issues. For this reason, she also rejects the idea of proving a point or testing a
hypothesis. Cohn acknowledges that the questioners identity will shape the questions
as well as the answers respondents would be likely to give; she refers to
her own shifting identities, from the time of her earlier work when she
was a young woman in a male world of defense intellectuals, where her
questions were heard as naive, to the time of her later research, when her
identity had changed. Moving into the category of feminist college
professor did not have a positive effect in terms of talking to the military;
there was heightened sensitivity around gender issues and increased
hostility to the term feminist.

Block Stuff

A2: Alt Gets Coopted

The alternative wont be co-opted.
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. 33 {Shoell}

vision of national security, which deemphasizes its military

dimension and was dismissed at the time as impractical, is quite compatible with the new
thinking on common security I have just described. Like women at the Halifax and Nairobi
Jane Addams's

conferences, contemporary new thinkers also include the elimination of structural violence in their definition of

women peace researchers were

among the pioneers in this contemporary redefinition of security , although, like
security. Feminist peace researcher Elise Boulding tells us that

Jane Addams at the beginning of the century, their work did not receive the attention it deserved. It is often the
case that new ideas in any discipline do not receive widespread attention unless they are adopted by significant

women's work tends to become invisible through cooptation. Boulding claims that the one area in which women are not in
danger of co-optation is their analysis of patriarchy and the linkage of war
to violence against women. Like most other feminists, Boulding believes that these issues must also
numbers of men, in which case

be included in any comprehensive definition of security. Given these various definitions of security offered by

feminist perspectives on security would grow out of quite

different assumptions about the individual, the state, and the
international system. Using feminist literature from various disciplines and approaches I shall now
women, it is evident that

suggest what some of these perspectives might look like.

A2: Perm
Perm will never work - adding in women and discussions of
gender into IR reinscribes gender hierarchies.
Tickner 2014 (J. Ann, Dr. Tickner received her Ph.D from Brandeis University and her MA from Yale
University. She works at American University as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence and is a Professor Emerita at
the University of Southern California. A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Oxford University Press,
pgs 81-82)//JS
All these feminist theoretical approaches, upon which IR feminists have drawn, are grounded in social and political
theory and sociological traditions, many of which lie outside the discipline of international relations. Therefore, while
international theorists are often justifiably frustrated when feminists cannot provide a brief overview of feminist
theory, feminists find communication on this issue with scholars trained in social scientific methodologies equally
difficult because of the lack of agreement as to what counts as legitimate scientific inquiry. Since all these feminist
approaches question the claim that women can simply be added to existing theoretical frameworks, it is predictable
that misunderstandings will compound when those working within the scientific tradition suggest that feminist

feminists have a
legitimate fear of co-optation; so often womens knowledge has been
forgotten or subsumed under more dominant discourses .19 Incorporation
can also be a source of misunderstanding when international theorists,
responding to challenges of gender blindness, have attempted to make
women more visible in their texts. For, as Emily Rosenberg (1990) tells us,
efforts to integrate women into existing theories and consider them
approaches can be incorporated into conventional IR methodologies. Indeed,

equally with men can only lead to a theoretical cul-de-sac that further
reinforces gender hierarchies. For example, in international relations,
when we add exceptional womenthe famous few such as Margaret
Thatcher or Golda Meier who succeed in the tough world of international
politics by acting like mento existing frameworks, it tends to imply,
without the claim being made overtly, that the problem of their absence
lies with women themselves . Conversely, if we go looking for women
working in womens spheres, such as peace groups, it only reinforces the socially
constructed boundaries between activities differentially deemed appropriate for women and for men; moreover, it
contributes to the false claim that women are more peaceful than men, a
claim that disempowers both women and peace. Although feminists are frequently told
that they are implying that women are more peaceful than men, as I discussed in Chapter 2, many are quite
suspicious of this association of women with peace. Besides being derivative of an essentialized position about
womens nature, to which most contemporary feminists do not subscribe, this association tends to brand women
as naive and unrealistic, thereby further delegitimizing their voices in the world of foreign policy-making (Sylvester
1987; Elshtain 1990). Feminists are arguing for moving beyond knowledge frameworks that construct international
theory without attention to gender and for searching deeper to find ways in which gender hierarchies serve to
reinforce socially constructed institutions and practices that perpetuate different and unequal role expectations,
expectations that have contributed to fundamental inequalities between women and men in the world of

including gender as a central category of analysis

transforms knowledge in ways that go beyond adding women; importantly,
but frequently misunderstood, this means that women cannot be studied
in isolation from men.
international politics. Therefore,

No, the aff ISNT a step in the right direction. The aff has a
false sense of progress which ignores hierarchal structures
and allows them to continue.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and

Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 79 {Shoell}
While IPE feminists have been centrally engaged with the debate about the pros and cons of economic
globalization, most of them have been quite critical of the assumptions and prescriptions of liberalism. Feminist
scholars more generally tend to be skeptical of celebrations of beginnings and endings and historical turning points:

times of progress are often regressive for

women. For example, the triumph of capitalism in the former Eastern
bloc was accompanied by a sharp decline in both the economic status of
women and their level of political participation . Skeptical of claims about a new world
order, feminist perspectives on economic globalization are unanimous in pointing to
continuities in various forms of patriarchy that have had detrimental
effects on womens economic security throughout much of history. Given the
they find evidence to suggest that

increase in global inequality, the feminization of poverty, and the discriminations that women often face when they

feminist scholarship is questioning the

triumphalist story of a borderless world that is being told by supporters of
economic globalization. It is todays global financiers and corporate executives, those whom Cox has
participate in the global market, some

defined as the transnational managerial classmost of whom are menwho seem most comfortably to fit

reject theoretical projects that offer

universal, essentialist, or reductionist explanations of multifaceted and
complex social relations. 50 Many claim that liberalisms metanarratives about
the triumph of rationality and the end of history have not moved us
beyond ideology; rather, they are a disguise for a form of knowledge that
tells only a partial storya story that often does not include the
experiences of many women (and marginalized people more generally)
whose identification with a marketized version of global citizenship is
minimal. Certain feminists also claim that values espoused by liberalism of privilege
such as individual freedom, the importance of property rights, and
universalismemphasize values associated with a Western form of
hegemonic masculinity. These values are then reproduced in economic models that tend
to conflate this masculine viewpoint with a general human standpoint ,
thereby confining the feminine to the structural position of other ; such
definitions of global citizenship. Most feminists also

thinking renders the masculine as norm and the feminine as difference. 51 For example, when proponents of
economic globalization speak of economic actors and global citizens, they are using terms that come out of a
historical tradition of Western political and economic thought and practice based on experiences more typical of

Denied the right to vote, in all societies, until the twentieth

century, women are still seeking full citizenship in many parts of the
world. Terms such as these focus our attention on the public world of the market and the state, historically
inhabited by men, while rendering the private world of women virtually invisible. Fukuyamas prediction
of a common marketization of international relations based on economic
calculation comes out of this worldview that portrays individuals solely as
economic actors and hides the complex social relations, including class
and gender relations, within which individuals lives are embedded. The
men than women.

market model, favored by liberals, is based on the instrumentally rational behavior of economic actors whose selfinterested behavior in the marketplace leads to an aggregate increase in wealth. Households and womens labor
more generally remain invisible in economic analyses that privilege productive labor over reproductive labor.52 This

representation of homo economicus is detached from the behavior of

real people in the material world; it is gendered masculine because it
extrapolates from roles and behaviors historically associated with Western
(elite) men. However, it has been used by liberal economists to represent
the behavior of humanity as a whole. It also tends to mask power
relationships that structure differential rewards to different individuals,
based on class and race as well as gender.

The permutation only includes feminism as a token identity,

sapping the critique of transformative power and reinforcing
the socially constructed boundaries between identities.
Tickner 97 J. Ann: Professor in the School of International Relations at University of Southern California,
President of the International Studies Association, the most respected and widely known scholarly association in this
field - Dec., 1997 You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR Theorists
International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4.
All these feminist theoretical approaches, upon which IR feminists have drawn, are grounded in social and political
theory and sociological traditions many of which lie outside the discipline of international relations. Therefore, while
international theorists are often justifiably frustrated when feminists cannot provide a brief overview of feminist
theory, feminists find communication on this issue with scholars trained in social scientific methodologies equally
difficult bemuse of the lack of agreement as to what counts as legitimate scientific inquiry. Since all these

feminist approaches question the claim that women can simply be added to existing
theoretical frameworks, it is predictable that misunderstandings will compound
when those working within the scientific tradition suggest that feminist approaches
can be incorporated into conventional IR methodologies . Indeed, feminists have a
legitimate fear of cooptation; so often women's knowledge has been forgotten or
subsumed under more dominant discourses.22 Incorporation can also be a source of
misunderstanding when international theorists, responding to challenges of gender
blindness, have attempted to make women more visible in their texts. For, as Emily
Rosenberg (1990) tells us, efforts to integrate women into existing theories and consider
them equally with men can only lead to a theoretical cul-de-sac which further
reinforces gender hierarchies. For example, in international relations, when we add exceptional womenthe famous few such as Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meier who succeed in the tough world of international politics
by acting like men-to existing frameworks, it tends to imply, without the claim being made overtly, that the problem

if we go looking for women working in

"women's spheres," such as peace groups, it only reinforces the socially constructed
boundaries between activities differentially deemed appropriate for women and for
men; moreover, it contributes to the false claim that women are more peaceful than men, a claim that
of their absence lies with women themselves. Conversely,

disempowers both women and peace. Although feminists are frequently told that they are implying that women are

Besides
being derivative of an essentialized position about women's "nature," to which most
contemporary feminists do not subscribe. this association tends to brand women as
naive and unrealistic, thereby further delegitimizing their voices in the world of
foreign policy making.
more peaceful than men, many are actually quite suspicious of this association of women with peace.

The affirmative cannot sever the epistemological assumptions

which render the 1AC intelligible; the plan is merely a part in
the whole exposition of the affirmatives system of thought.
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, proquest]

why is the identification and pinning down of

epistemology so important? In Steve Smiths words, what is at stake in the epistemology debate?
The answer lies in the fact that the epistemology of a discipline makes it what it is i.e.
decides its ontology. It explains what is the nature of being or the world
from the point of view of the discipline, in this case, International Relations.5
Epistemology is important because it creates the fundamental
demarcation between what can and cannot be discussed; it defines the agenda of
the discipline. Steve Smith accurately describes how certain theories come to acquire the
status of being common sense which automatically means that
dominant theories come to be taken for granted and those that offer a
different perspective cannot even be brought to the discussion table52 .
Thus, if certain methodologies employing particular epistemologies fashion
The fundamental question that arises is just

certain theories, then other methodologies with different epistemic

premises would lead to different kinds of knowledges , theories and conclusions. But,
these theories and conclusions would be declared to be invalid because they fall outside the purview of acceptable
norms of knowledge construction in International Relations.The

link between theory and

practice or the fact that theory makes action cannot be emphasized
enough. In keeping with the Foucauldian tradition, Jim George states that a discourse makes real that which it
prescribes as meaningful (2000: 24). Thus, positivism with an empiricist epistemology fashions the realist
paradigm, which in turn, has ossified itself and become a truth in International Relations theory. <98-99>

The alt is mutually exclusive we just start from a completely

different epistemological and ontological standpoint to yield
results. The permutation cant solve.
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, proquest]

in IR,
The
reasons for this neglect can be traced back to the fact that IR is, largely, a
West-centric, elitist and male dominated discipline which leaves no room
to represent or understand the other. The central aim of this thesis was to
analyze the discipline from an alternative perspective because starting
from a different ontological and epistemological point would yield very
different results. To that extent, I used a materialist ecofeminist perspective to
analyze the discipline of IR which looked at the discipline from the point of
view of the most marginalized, the poorest sections of human society
existing on the borders of life and death and just barely surviving an extremely precarious
This thesis has sought to show that overall,

the Third World is

a rather

neglected

topic

especially, in terms of addressing its material existence of grinding poverty and lack of material resources.

existence. This has meant, to use the old Marxist phrase, turning the discipline on its head. As mentioned earlier,
womens role is critical in keeping the Third World alive through subsistence. They have taken on a responsibility

perspective helps to
expose the deeper reasons for this neglect by situating it within an
overarching framework of exploitation. It shows that nature and women were
the first colonies of civilizing man which were followed by other
categories of race, class, caste, colonies, etc., many of which often overlap. The rulers
or masters deny their dependency on those who fulfill their material and
bodily needs and simultaneously continue to exploit them. They also put
certain ideologies in place that serve to justify the existing system of
exploitation and thus, the material and the ideational! cultural aspects of
power reinforce each other.
that is shirked by the men, the states and the world-community. An ecofeminist

The alternative must take action that is not intrinsically tied to

the state. Only a fluid discussion and genealogy of social
constructed gender will enable discussion that is the critical
from of departure
Connell 90 R. W. Connell (Professor of Education at the University of Sydney in Australia) The State,
Gender, and Sexual Politics: Theory and Appraisal http://www.jstor.org/stable/657562 Theory and Society, Vol. 19,
No. 5, (Oct., 1990), pp. 507-544
Recent theoretical writing contains a remarkable series of sketches of a theory of the patriarchal state; at least nine
have appeared in English, as essays or book chapters, since 1978.4 Materials for developing them are available in
immense volume, in practical experience and academic writing. Yet the sketches have remained sketches; there

we need to look carefully at

the conceptual foundations of the discussion and perhaps configure it in
another way. The first section of this article is an exploration of the main ways of thinking about gender,
has not been a sustained development of theory. This suggests that

sexuality, and the state to be found in English-language writing in recent decades. I argue that there are indeed
some problems in the theoretical bases of this literature that have severely limited it. The second section of the
article is

an attempt to move beyond these limits by proposing, not an

alternative sketch of the patriarchal state, but at a somewhat more

generalized level a framework for theorizing the interplay of gender
relations and state dynamics. This is meant to be systematic, though brief. It is based on the view
that gender is a collective phenomenon, an aspect of social institutions as
well as an aspect of personal life, and is therefore internal as well as
external to the state. Put another way, the state as an institution is part of a
wider social structure of gender relations. A recognition of the historicity
of gender relations is the essential point of departure. Accordingly the exposition of
the framework begins with the question of the historical constitution of the state. The analysis moves
from this starting-point toward issues of political practice. My assumption
throughout is that the point of a theory of the state is a better capacity to make appraisals of political strategy.

Feminist methodology is incompatible with the affirmative

top down approach bad
Tickner 01J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg. 4-5]

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
Whereas

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.

We need continuous confrontation with hegemonic masculinity

in IR to prevent atrocities.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 146 {Shoell}

the world of national security and high

politics, where, frequently, the voices of women or the questions that feminists
ask have not been regarded as legitimate. As I have shown, the same could be said about
Studying up takes feminists like Cohn into

some of the questions feminists have asked of the discipline of international relations. In the late 1980s, when
feminists began to bring their concerns to a discipline unaccustomed to thinking that gender had anything to do
with international politics, their critiques and research agendas seemed out of place, given conventional disciplinary
boundaries. Frequently, the feminists own training did not adequately prepare them for investigating the kinds of

IR feminists have had to

continue, supplement, or overturn their graduate, professional
issues with which they were concerned. In order to undertake their research,

disciplinary education as they seek new methodolgies better able to

investigate the kinds of questions they are attempting to answer. IR
feminists will continue to challenge disciplinary boundaries and methods
that, they believe, impose limitations on the kinds of questions that can
be asked and the ways in which they can be answered. For this reason, their work
often seems disconnected from a discipline, centered in political science, that can appear as inhospitable terrain for
gender analysis. A world of states situated in an anarchical international system leaves little room for analyses of
social relations, including gender relations. Consequently, as this chapter has shown, feminists have gone outside
political science and drawn upon methods, such as ethnography and discourse analysis, more prevalent in sociology
and anthropology. Coming out of a long tradition of crossdisciplinary feminist theory, IR feminists are, therefore,
building transdisciplinary knowledge rather than knowledge based in political science; they are beginning to

Listening to voices
not previously recognized in the discipline has allowed IR feminists to see
different worlds, ask new questions, and begin to build the kind of
practical knowledge necessary to construct more democratic theories and
practices.
establish their own research agendas, albeit using different methodologies to do so.

A2: Aff Removes Troops

The affirmative sees war as a single event, ignores broader
structures of militarism that are omnipresent in society.
Cuomo 96 (Chris J., She is a Professor of Philosophy and Womens Studies at the University of Georgia and
a totally rad human, War is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence, Hypatia, Vol.
11, No. 4 Women and Violence (Autumn, 1996), accessed via JSTOR, p. 30-32, AO)

attention to war has typically appeared in the form of justifications

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 typically
marked by formal, institutional declarations. As happenings, wars and military activities can be
Philosophical

seen as motivated by identifiable, if complex, intentions, and directly enacted by individual and collective decision-

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
makers and agents of states. But

oppressed groups; how military violence shapes gendered, 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

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 post modem
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 event based conception of war inadequate,
especially insofar as gender is taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her
institutions and hegemonies-cannot be adequately pursued by focusing on events. These issues

argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on events are impoverished in a number of ways, and

feminist consideration of the political, ethical, and ontological

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
therefore

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

Theory that does not investigate or even notice the

omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the depth and
specificity of the everyday 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
postcolonial circumstances.

violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among
the constant presence 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

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 crisis-based politics and
analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options,
for social problems.

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
declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and
complicitous in the general presence of global militarism . Seeing war as
necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to
the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening early 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 connections among phenomena like the "war on
drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded militaristic campaigns.

Declarations of war are just overdetermined eruptions of

militarism, its all around us
Cuomo 96 (Chris J., She is a Professor of Philosophy and Womens Studies at the University of Georgia and
a totally rad human, War is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence, Hypatia, Vol.
11, No. 4 Women and Violence (Autumn, 1996), accessed via JSTOR, p. 33, AO)

Just-war theory is a prominent example of a philosophical approach that rests on the assumption that wars
are isolated from everyday life and ethics. Such theory, as developed by St. Augustine, Thomas
Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius, and as articulated in contemporary dialogues
by many philosophers, including Michael Walzer (1977), Thomas Nagel (1974), and
Sheldon Cohen (1989), take the primary question concerning the ethics of
warfare to be about when to enter into military conflicts against other
states. They therefore take as a given the notion that war is an isolated,
definable event with clear boundaries. These boundaries are significant
because they distinguish the circumstances in which standard moral rules
and constraints, such as rules against murder and unprovoked violence,
no longer apply. Just-war theory assumes that war is a separate sphere of
human activity having its own ethical constraints and criteria and in doing
so it begs the question of whether or not war is a special kind of event, or
part of a pervasive presence in nearly all contemporary life. Because the
application of just-war principles is a matter of proper decision making on
the part of agents of the state, before wars occur, and before military
strikes are made, they assume that military initiatives are distinct events .

In fact,

declarations of war are generally overdetermined escalations of

preexisting conditions . Just-war criteria cannot help evaluate military and related institutions,
including their peacetime practices and how these relate to wartime activities, so they cannot address
the ways in which armed conflicts between and among states emerge from
omnipresent, often violent, state militarism . The remarkable resemblances in some sectors
between states of peace and states of war remain completely untouched by theories that are only able to discuss

Applications of just-war
help create the illusion that the "problem of war" is being
addressed when the only considerations are the ethics of declaring wars
and of military violence within the boundaries of declarations of war and
peace. Though just-war considerations might theoretically help decision-makers avoid specific gross eruptions of
the ethics of starting and ending direct military conflicts between and among states.
criteria actually

military violence, the aspects of war which require the underlying presence of militarism and the direct effects of

There may be important decisions to be

made about when and how to fight war, but these must be considered in
terms of the many other aspects of contemporary war and militarism that
are significant to nonmilitary personnel, including women and nonhumans.
the omnipresence of militarism remain untouched.

A2: Essentialism
K associates feminism, not women, with peace the distinction
is critical to problematizing essentialism and masculinity.
Tickner 1 (J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era, p. 60-61) JM
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 1991although 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.

Were not essentialistnaming women as a category doesnt

deny differences and is crucial for any material change
Bender 90 (Leslie, She is a Professor of Law Emerita at Syracuse University College of Law. Esq. Bender
received her JD from the University of Pittsburg and her LLM from Harvard University. From Gender Difference to
Feminist Solidarity: Using Carol Gilligan and an Ethic of Care in Law, 15 Vermont Law Review 1 (1990) 36-48)

Even though speaking universally for all women may be problematic, there
are times when it is appropriate and even necessary to speak for more
than oneself. Women must be able to speak for and about women. No one
woman can be the authoritative voice of all women, but certainly one woman can be a voice for
more women than herself alone. What makes gender a useful and necessary
construct is that it is an experienced history and a societal relationship of power
that shapes us in spite of our individual differences. The gender woman is not
just the cumulative adding up of individual experiences of being female. It is a structure of
domination that not only forms identities and practices, but also
potentially empowers those experiencing its oppression to speak for
others from that location in appropriate contexts. The gender category
woman affects many people simultaneously. It affects me individually and
psychologically, as well as politically, socially, historically, economically, and culturally. I can speak about
my personal experiences of being gendered woman, and I can speak about
the structure and effects of gender on women in our society. I am not the
authority, and I make no claims to be, but neither will I be silenced by
claims that my speaking for women and about sexism generally commits
the universalism fallacy. I recognize that I have more currency to speak in certain contexts and to

certain audiences than others. Yet I will not grant that everyone who speaks for or about women has equal
authority.67 Likewise, African-Americans can speak of their personal experiences and can speak for their race about
the structure and effects of racism in our society. Some individuals have more authority to speak than others, but

As Linda Alcoff has persuasively argued, ones

privilege to speak for is tested by the location and context of speech
and its intended and potential effects.8 The appropriateness of speaking
for is context-bound and relative to the dynamics of privilege and
responsibility between speakers and listeners. Analytic categories like
race and gender ought not be infinitely deconstructed. There must be stopping
points, or the power of the political critique dissolves.60 There are times when the differences
of race, class, and other social relations are critical to our theories; and
there are contexts where those differences ought to be subsumed. If the
category of woman is broken down so far that all that is left are individual
experiences, the forest may be lost for the truth is Gender matters. It has
material consequences in the world. A critique that claims that the
no one spokesperson is the authority.

category of women is essentialist or incohernt defuses identity politics

and its concomitant empowerment of women . It interferes with potential
for political solidarity. The category women may not be appropriate for
all analyses in all contexts, but it is vital to many analyses in law. Women
are collectively affected by laws and our legal order, and women need to
organize around this political reality. Our common need to work together for all of us does not

require us to ignore the differences in our experiences and political power. Nothing prevents us from being different

Most contemporary feminist difference

theories avoid the universalism fallacy because they listen carefully to
others claims, recognize their own partiality, and seek a politics of
inclusion based on an appreciation of human dignity and the value of
diversity and multiculturalism.
yet still working together for common ends.

The K is intersectional; we criticize the normative notions of

state policy and the way it willfully ignores the lives of
marginalized folks.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 18 {Shoell}
In important ways, all of these approaches challenge the assumptions and worldviews of liberal feminism as well as
its positivist/empiricist epistemological foundations. Today, however, feminist theory is engaged in a fundamental

in the 1970s, it was assumed

that the various structural causes of womens oppression could be
specified and broken down, this consensus has now eroded . For example, Nira
reassessment of these approaches and their epistemologies. While,

Yuval-Davis has argued that the notion of patriarchy, so important to radical and socialist feminisms, is highly
problematic. While it may be appropriate for specific historical periods and geographical regions, Yuval-Davis claims
that it is much too crude an analytical instrument. In most societies, certain women have power over some men as
well as over other women.31 This debate, which began in the late 1980s, has been strongly influenced by

the impact of black

feminist critiques, which have introduced considerations of race and class,
and to the influence of postmodernism that has called into question the
possibility of systematic knowledge cumulation .32 These and other critics have argued
that standpoint theories failed to recognize differences amongst women
based on race, class, sexual preference, and geographical location.
Standpoint has been faulted for basing its generalized knowledge claims
on the experiences of white Western women. As Patricia Hill Collins tells
postcolonial, Third World, and postmodern feminisms. This is due both to

us, African American women experience the world differently from those
who are not black and female.33 Questioning liberal feminisms focus on
equality, black feminists remind us that black women would be unlikely to
subscribe to the goal of equality with black men, who are themselves
victims of oppression. Third World women have begun to question the term
feminist because of its association with Western cultural imperialism.
Stressing the importance of producing their own knowledge and recovering their own identities, these women,
speaking out of the historical experiences of colonial oppression, offer further evidence of a multiplicity of
oppressions.Chandra

Mohanty, while she acknowledges the impossibility of

representing all their diverse histories, suggests the need to explore,
analytically, the links among the struggles of Third World women against
racism, sexism, colonialism, and capitalism. She and other postcolonial
feminists use the term Third World to include North American women of
color; their writings have insisted on the need to analyze the
interrelationships between feminist, antiracist, and nationalist struggles.
Postcolonial feminists interpret imperialism as the historical imposition of
an imperial order, based on white, masculine values, on subjugated and
feminized colonial peoples.34 Avtar Brah claims that, in todays world, feminist questions
about womens locations in the global economic system cannot be
answered without reference to class, ethnicity, and geographical
location.35 Dissatisfaction with the essentialism of early standpoint theory
has moved feminist theory toward the consideration of multiple
standpoints and multiple subjectivities.36 Whereas, in the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis
was on a political agenda designed to work toward the equality of women, this new concern with the
identity of the subject has shifted theoretical considerations toward
philosophical and epistemological issues and has brought feminist theory
closer to postmodern perspectives. According to Michele Barrett, the social sciences are losing
their purchase; the new turn to culture has moved feminism toward the humanities and philosophy.37

Were not essentialist, we posit ourselves in opposition to

hegemonic masculinity because it controls normative IR.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 14 {Shoell}

Both radical and psychoanalytic feminism have generated criticism

particularly for their essentialism, or seeing woman as an
undifferentiated category across time, class, race, and culture . Critics have also
claimed that valorizing and celebrating female characteristics can perpetuate rather than overcome womens

Radical feminisms attribution of all womens oppression to an

undifferentiated concept of patriarchy, and psychoanalytic feminisms
explanations for womens subordination as being fixed in early childhood,
appear overly determined. Nevertheless, these approaches began to offer
versions of womens standpoint, which have since been refined and
incorporated into other approaches. The use of gender as a conceptual category of analysis is
marginalization.

also rooted in early radical feminism. Before moving to other postliberal approaches and to some of the
contemporary debates generated by these approaches, I will first offer a definition of gender, on which a variety of
postliberal feminist approaches have depended for their theoretical investigations. As Sandra Harding has

gendered social life is produced through three distinct processes:

assigning dualistic gender metaphors to various perceived dichotomies;
appealing to these gender dualisms to organize social activity; and
dividing necessary social activities between different groups of humans . She
refers to these three aspects of gender as gender symbolism, gender structure, and
suggested,

individual gender.17 Feminists define gender as a set of variable but socially and
culturally constructed characteristics: those such as power, autonomy,
rationality, activity, and public are stereotypically associated with
masculinity; their oppositesweakness, dependence/ connection,
emotionality, passivity, and privateare associated with femininity. There is
evidence to suggest that both women and men assign a more positive value to these
masculine characteristics that denote a kind of hegemonic masculinity
an ideal type of masculinity, embedded in the characteristics defined as
masculine but to which few men actually conform. 18 They do, however, define what
men ought to be. Characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity vary across time and culture and are

They serve to support male power

and female subordination and they also reinforce the power of dominant
groups, since minorities have frequently been characterized as lacking in
these characteristics. Indeed, there is a hierarchy of masculinities in which
gender interacts with class and race. Importantly, definitions of masculinity and
femininity are relational and depend on each other for their meaning; masculinities do not exist
except in contrast with femininities. It is also important to note that there
can be no such thing as hegemonic femininity, because masculinity
defines the norm. As Joan Scott claims, while the definition of masculinity and femininity and the forms
gender relations take across different cultures may vary, they are almost always unequal; therefore, gender in
the structural sense is a primary way of signifying relationships of power .
Although gender is frequently seen as belonging in the household, Scott argues that it is constructed
in the economy and the polity through various institutional structures that
have the effect of naturalizing, and even legalizing, womens inferior
status.20 Recent feminist writings that deal with issues of race and class problematize
these power relationships still further. Individual gender relations enter into and are
subject to change according to the requirements of power.

constituent elements in every aspect of human experience. Jane Flax reminds us that, while feminism is about
recovering womens activities, it must also be aware of how these activities are constituted through the social

gender is not just about women: it is also about

Gender is a notion that offers a set of frameworks within
which feminist theory has explained the social construction and
representation of differences between the sexes.23 Consequently, working
for gender equality is deemed impossible by many feminists because,
definitionally, gender signifies relationships of inequality .24 Rather, feminists
should work toward making gender visible in order to move beyond its
oppressive dynamics.
relations in which they are situated.21 Therefore,
men and masculinity.22

Essentialism claims put the blame on the oppresssed and

excuse the oppressor-- your focus on marginalized bodies
becoming authoritative never questions that white male
bodies are always already essentializing the classroom.
Critiques of essentialism reproduce a coercive insider/outsider
binary on acceptable knowledge.
hooks 91 [bell, the best there ever was. "Essentialism and Experience"
American Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 172-183]

According to Fuss, issues of "essence, identity, and experience" erupt in the classroom primarily because of the

whenever she offers an

example of individuals who use essentialist standpoints to dominate discussion, to
silence others via their invocation of the "authority of experience," they
are members of groups who historically have been and are oppressed
and exploited in this society. Fuss does not address how systems of domination already at work in the
critical input from marginalized groups. Throughout her chapter, This

academy and the classroom silence t he voices of individualsf rom marginalizedg roups and give space only when

She does not suggest that the very discursive

practices that allow for the assertion of the "authority of experience"
have already been determined by politics of race, sex, and class
domination. Fuss does not aggressively suggest that dominant groupson the basis of experience it is demanded.

men, white people, heterosexuals-perpetuate essentialism . In her

narrative it is always a marginal "other" who is essentialist.

Yet the politics of

essentialist exclusion as a means of asserting presence, identity, is a cultural practice that does not emerge solely
from marginalized groups. And when those groups do employ essentialism as a way to dominate in institutional
settings, they are often imitating paradigms for asserting subjectivity that are part of the controlling apparatus in
structures of domination. Certainly many white male students have brought to my classroom an insistence on the
authority of experience, one that enables them to feel that anything they have to say is worth hearing, that

The politics of
race and gender within white supremacist patriarchy grants them this
"authority" without their having to name the desire for it. They do not attend class
indeed their ideas and experience should be the central focus of classroom discussion.

and say, "I think that I am superior intellectually to my classmates because I am white and male and that my
experiences are much more important than any other group's." And yet their behavior often announces this way

Why does Fuss's chapter ignore the subtle

and overt ways essentialismi s expressedf rom a location of privilege ?W hy
of thinking about identity, essence, subjectivity.

does she primarily critique the misuses of essentialism by centering her analysis on marginalized groups?

Doing so makes them the culprits for disrupting the classroom and
making it an "unsafe" place. Is this not a conventional way the colonizer
speaks of the colonized, the oppressor of the oppressed?

Fuss asserts, "Problems

often begin in the classroom when those 'in the know' commerce only with others 'in the know,' excluding and
marginalizing those perceived to be outside the magic circle" (115). This observation, which could certainly apply
to any group, prefaces a focus on critical commentary by Edward Said that reinforces her critique of the dangers of
essentialism. He appears in the text as resident "Third World authority" legitimating her argument. Critically
echoing Said, Fuss comments: "For Said it is both dangerous and misleading to base an identity politics upon rigid
theories of exclusions, 'exclusions that stipulate, for instance, only women can understand feminine experience,
only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial subjects can understand colonial experience'"
(115). I agree with Said's critique, but I reiterate that while I too critique the use of essentialism and identity
politics as a strategy for exclusion or domination, I am suspicious when theoriesc all this practice harmful as a
way of suggesting that it is a strategy only marginalized groups employ. My suspicion is rooted in the awareness
that

a critique of essentialism that challenges only marginalized groups to

interrogate their use of identity politics or an essentialist standpoint as

a means of exerting coercive power leaves unquestioned the critical
practices of other groups who employ the same strategies in different
ways and whose exclusionary behavior may be firmly buttressed by
institutionalized structures of domination that do not critique or check
it . At the same time, I am concerned that critiques of identity politics not serve as the
new chic way to silence students from marginal groups . Fuss makes the point that
"the artificial boundary between insider and outsider necessarily contains rather than disseminates knowledge"
(115). While I share this perception, I am disturbed that she never acknowledges that racism, sexism, and class

elitism shape the structure of classrooms, creating a lived reality of

insider/outsider that is predetermined, often in place before any class
discussion begins . There is rarely any need for marginalized groups to
bring this binary opposition into the classroom because it is usually
already operating. They may simply use it in the service of their
concerns . Looked at from a sympathetic standpoint, the assertion of an excluding
essentialism on the part of students from marginalized groups can be a

strategic response to domination and to colonization, a survival strategy

that may indeed inhibit discussion even as it rescues those students
from negation . Fuss argues that "[i]t is the unspoken law of the classroom not to trust those who cannot
cite experience as the indisputable grounds of their knowledge. Such unwritten laws pose perhaps the most
serious threat to classroom dynamics in that they breed suspicion amongst those inside the circle and guilt
(sometimes anger) amongst those outside the circle" (116-17). Yet she does not discuss who makes these laws,
who determines classroom dynamics. Does she perhaps assert her authority in a manner that unwittingly sets up a
competitived ynamic by suggestingt hat the classroom belongs more to the professor than to the students, to
some students more than others?

Conceiving feminism as a genealogy avoids the problems of

exclusionary essentialism and disenfranchising antiessentialism.
Stone et al 04 Alison, professor of philosophy, Lancaster University BA Hons Philosophy (Kent), DPhil
Philosophy (Sussex). On the Genealogy of Women: A Defence of Anti-Essentialism. Third Wave Feminism A Critical
Exploration. Edited by Stacy Gillis, School of English, University of Exeter, UK. Gillian Howie, Department of
Philosophy, University of Liverpool, UK. Rebecca Munford, School of English, University of Exeter, UK
http://173.254.41.70/ziliao1/%C5%AE%C8%A8%D6%F7%D2%E5/%A1%BE%C5%AE
%D0%D4%D6%F7%D2%E5%D1%D0%BE%BF%A1%BF%B5%DA%C8%FD%B2%A8%C5%AE
%D0%D4%D6%F7%D2%E5.pdf {Shoell}
Youngs important insight into the need to reconceive femininity as a non-unified type of social group can be more
consistently developed if we rethink femininity as not a series but a specifically logical group. This genealogical

We
should rethink collective feminist activities as predicated not upon any
shared set of feminine concerns but, rather, on overlaps and indirect
connections within womens historical and cultural experience. Let me outline
rethinking of femininity entails a concomitant rethinking of feminist politics as coalitional rather than unified.

how a genealogical and coalitional rethinking of feminism could surmount the dilemma generated by critiques of

the concept
of genealogy might allow us to reinstate, from an anti-essentialist viewpoint,
the idea that women are a distinct social group. In Gender Trouble, Butler appropriates
essentialism. Women as genealogy Several prominent feminist thinkers have suggested that

this concept to outline a genealogical understanding of what it is to be a woman (5). Similarly, Gatens proposes a
genealogy of the category woman or women . . . a genealogical approach asks: how has woman/ women

These references to genealogy

imply that femininity is historically constructed in multiple, shifting ways,
its fluctuations in meaning registering changes in social relations of
power. However, Butler and Gatens do not explicate precisely what a genealogical rethinking of femininity
functioned as a discursive category throughout history? (76)

consists in. To fill in this gap, we must trace the concept of genealogy back to Nietzsches On the Genealogy of
Morality.10 One of Nietzsches principal aims in the Genealogy of Morality is to deny that any common
characteristics unite all the institutions, practices, and beliefs classified under the heading of morality. As such,
Nietzsche adopts an anti-essentialist approach to morality. He understands its diverse practices and beliefs as
falling under the rubric of morality solely because they belong within a distinctive history. This history is to be
studied through a novel form of enquiry genealogy. The genealogist traces how some contemporary practice has
arisen from an indefinitely extended process whereby earlier forms of the practice have become reinterpreted by

Genealogists treat any current phenomenon as arising as a

reinterpretation of some pre-existing practice, which it harnesses for a
new function, and to which it assigns a new direction (Nietzsche 5456). Thus, a
later ones.

genealogy takes shape when a practice (such as punishment) becomes subjected to repeated reinter- pretations
that impact upon its meaning and structure. For instance, an early aim of punishment was to secure a yield of
pleasure for the punisher, but subsequently the practice became reinterpreted moralistically as serving to

any
reinterpretation must install itself by accommodating, as far as possible,
the meanings embedded in the pre-existing practice, though necessarily it
sheds any irreconcilable elements of those meanings. Reinterpretation is
therefore a conflictual process in which present forces strive actively to
take over recalcitrant elements of the past.11 Crucially, for Nietzsche, any practice that
restore justice in the wake of a criminal infraction (Nietzsche 57). According to Nietzsche,

succumbs to reinterpretation has itself already taken shape as the sedimentation of earlier layers of interpretation.
But these layers of meaning do not just accumulate: because irreconcilable elements of meaning are shed with

each instance of reinterpretation, a process of attrition takes place through which earlier layers of meaning
gradually get erased altogether. Consequently, no common core of significance endures through all the successive
waves of reinterpretation of any practice: for example, no common significance is shared by punishment practices
in ancient times and today. Similarly, the earlier meanings of all the other practices making up morality are
gradually, but inexorably, scratched out through recurring acts of reinterpretation. In studying some item
genealogically, then, we situate it within a given group for example, the group morality not because of any
essential characteristics that this item shares with all the other members of this group, but because the item is
appropriately historically related to the others in the group. More specifically, a set of such items is grouped
together only because each emerges as a reinterpretation of one or more of the others. For Nietzsche, any set of
items related in this overlapping way comprises a genealogy. Nietzsches concept of a genealogy as a chain of
historically overlapping phenomena opens up a promising way of reconceiving women as a social group without

Genealogically, we can understand women as a social

group, yet not as united by common characteristics but, rather, infinitely
varying while entangled together historically. The point of departure for a
genealogical analysis of femininity is that femininity is a mutable cultural
construction, not something causally deter- mined by biological sex. To
identify femininity as cultural is not necessarily to treat it as the attribute
of an immaterial mind. Part of what it is to live, think, and experience as a woman is to acquire a
yielding to essentialism.

feminine way of living ones body, a way of living physiologically. Moreover, acquiring femininity need not mean
being passively moulded by external cultural forces. Femininity is acquired, over time, insofar as one actively takes
up and internalises available cultural standards. As Butler puts it, acquiring a gender involves an incessant project,
a daily act of reconstruction and interpretation . . . a subtle and strategic project . . . an impulsive yet mindful
process of interpreting a cultural reality laden with sanctions, taboos and prescriptions (Variations 131). However,
each appropriation of existing standards concerning femininity effects a more or less subtle modification of their
meaning with reference to changing contexts, power relationships, and histories. As Butler states, gender
identity . . . [is] a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices (Gender
Trouble 138). Received meanings regarding gender are subjected to a continuous process of practical
reinterpretation, or imitation, with reference to differing histories of personal and cultural experience.

We are not essentialist. Traditional notions of femininity and

masculinity sustain war, thus our discussion of IR includes
discussion of normative gender understandings in order to
destroy them.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 59 {Shoell}
While these maternal images have often been quite successful in motivating womens peace movements, they

Lynne Segalwhile seeing womens peace

movements as among the strongest progressive forces of the 1980sis
troubled by the notion of an inherent pacifism in women and also by the
tendency of womens peace politics to reduce analyses of militarism to a
matter of individual psychology. An ideology of womens essential difference, typical of radical
feminism, may encourage men to fight for fear of appearing unmanly; moreover, biological
reductionism does not allow for change.78 In a context of a male-dominated society, the
association of men with war and women with peace also reinforces gender
hierarchies and false dichotomies that contribute to the devaluation of
both women and peace. The association of women and peace with idealism
in IR, which I have argued is a deeply gendered concept, has rendered it
less legitimate in the discourse of international relations . Although peace
have made many feminists uncomfortable.

movements that have relied on maternal images may have had some success, they do nothing to change existing
gender relations; this allows men to remain in control and continue to dominate the agenda of world politics, and it

An example of the
negative consequences of associating women with peace is Francis
Fukuyamas discussion of the biological roots of human aggression and its
association with war. Fukuyama claims that women are more peaceful than
mena fact that, he believes, for the most part is biologically determined.
continues to render womens voices as inauthentic in matters of foreign policymaking.

Therefore, a world run by women would be a more peaceful world.

However, Fukuyama claims that only in the West is the realization of what
he calls a feminized world likely; since areas outside the West will
continue to be run by younger aggressive men, Western men, who can
stand up to threats posed by dangers from outside, must remain in
charge, particularly in the area of international politics. 79 Besides its implications for
reinforcing a disturbing North/South split, this argument is deeply conservative; given the dangers of an aggressive
world, women must be kept in their place and out of international politics.80 The leap from aggressive men to

There is little evidence to suggest that men are

naturally aggressive and women are naturally peaceful; as bell hooks
reminds us, black women are very likely to feel strongly that white women
have been quite violent and militaristic in their support of racism. 81
Traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity that sustain war
aggressive states is also problematic.

require an exercise of power: they are not inevitable .

A2: War Inev

War is not inevitable, not intrinsic to human nature.
Eisenstein 08 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our
time. She has written feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years,
Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie
Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 33-35, AO)
Peace is often identified with females; and war with males. Because war
unsettles previously gendered life, space itself is reconstructed . The language of
war home front, battle zone, combatant, civilian challenges established notions of home, safety, and privacy.

Death creates new necessity. So many men lost their lives in the Rwandan
massacres that women now lead most of their local councils. In Iraq, so
many men have been taken into custody by US forces more than ten
thousand men and boys that women now do mens work. They till their
fields and guard their homes (Gettleman 2004: A1). Much of war is covert. Yet war
itself is an overt and violent form of politics. War is seeable, and in view,
even if not knowable. Because the obscene inequities and injustices of global
capitalism are more visible today, more crushing systems of power are
needed to protect it. The USA protects itself with its fists while democracy
is still trotted out as a defense and its women in khaki (Enloe 1983) are used as
a decoy. Meanwhile the protection of women along with children as civilians
is simultaneously used as a justification for war, despite the fact that 95 percent of the
casualties of war are civilians and the majority of these are women. These civilians are also
militarized as refugees, as wage-laborers, as haulers of wood and water,
as mothers. Women who enter the military enter a masculinist bastion .
Military culture seeks to stabilize and punish the dangerous female. At the
US Naval Academy a nightly ritual is practiced in which the new plebe
says, Goodnight, Jane Fonda; and the entire company responds,
Goodnight, bitch (Burke 2004: 14). Domestic violence is found to be three to
five times higher in military couples than civilian ones. Men who have
been in combat are four times more likely to be physically abusive. In 2002
five military wives were brutally killed by their husbands upon returning from Iraq to Fort Bragg (Lutz 2004: 17).
Before the September 11 2001 attacks, the Miles Foundation a non-profit agency in Connecticut that deals with
abuse in the military received about seventy-five calls a month from military families reporting domestic violence
and sexual abuse. After 9/11 it starting receiving 150 calls a week. Eight soldiers after returning from Iraq

War supposedly
exposes the evilness that lurks beneath the surface, which gives purpose
and trivializes everything else. War is both desired and despised. It is an
orgy of death, destruction and violence. As such war seduces. Christopher Hedges
describes and authorizes this Hobbesian version of life and death as one of male conquest. Men are driven
by eros, their flirtation with life, and thanatos, death (Hedges 2002: 3, 158, 171).
Thomas Hobbess world was a world of men women were missing. War
does not give me meaning. Nor do I think war gives most people male or female meaning. Hobbes
was not right about most men or women. Yet the naturalization and normalization of war
are maintained by this notion of a mythic human nature, which is also
constructed as male. It is dangerous to think that war is inevitable, and
committed suicide; another drowned his wife in the bathtub (Davey 2004: A1).

intrinsic to human nature . I do not think genes are simply nature, nor do I think human
nature is natural at all. The concept of nature is truly political at the start.
It is a construct that reifies the needs of those who need us to fight their
wars. In this techno-masculinist world that we inhabit we are shown war
as the drama of manhood. Sometimes it is named the Oedipal

compulsion, and the psychic quest for the father. Yet over 120,000
dutiful sons who fought the Vietnam War came home to commit suicide,
twice the number killed in the war (Boose 1993: 504, 605). Gender naturalizes
war; and war is gendered. Masculinity and femininity are set as normal
oppositions . And the sexual body itself is left silenced. The very process of birthing is most often not in view,
or is trivialized, or is fantasized (Ruddick 1993: 291). None of these options helps real live women. This process

War, in Hobbesian fashion, starts from

this mythic place. Women are absent giving birth; men kill. Or, as Klaus Theweleit says, War ranks high
among the male ways of giving birth (Theweleit 2003: 284). Women, then, are supposedly
peaceful; and men make war. The essentialist argument assigns these categories in nature while
masking the artificial gendering of wars. Women are sexed in particular ways and birth in
a world that demands that they nurture as well. If we give up the fixedness of both sex
silences and obfuscates the female body and leaves it unreadable.

and gender then we are left to examine the changeability of sexing gender and gendering sex. This does not erase

some women
may look to preserve life rather than smash it, but many females will enter
the military. This means that the practices of gender will change even though the authorized essentialized
sex or gender but rather demands an accounting of their politicized contextual meanings. So

views of femininity and manliness can remain static.

A2: Equality in Military

It is not about equal participation, its about the equal
opportunity to refuse to participate in militarism.
Davis 08 (Angela Y., American political activist, scholar, and author. She

emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader

of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party
through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, although she was never a
party member. Her interests included prisoner rights; she founded Critical
Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is
a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University
of California, Santa Cruz, and a former director of the university's Feminist Studies
department, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
and Minnie Bruce Pratt, A Vocabulary for Feminist Praxis: On War and Radical
Critique, Chapter 1, p. 19-22, AO)
I begin by questioning what it means to live in a country that is at war, a
country whose president, in announcing a global war on terror, has, in
effect, declared war on the rest of the world. This question requires us to
consider the unrepresentability of war in the United States , a country that has not
experienced war within its own borders since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet we have experienced a
comprehensive militarization of this society, and multiple wars are still
being waged on many of our communities. Moreover, the war on terror that is
unfolding both within and outside US borders has produced a moral panic
that urges us to feel and act as if we were living under a state of siege . Many
years ago, when I first traveled to Europe, I was struck by a prevailing popular consciousness of war. It was
almost two decades after the conclusion of World War II, although there
was still material evidence of the assault of fascism. I was struck by the extent to
which war was still palpable, by the contemporaneity of historical memories of war. And I compared these historical
memories to what I considered to be an inability of people in the United States to cross the temporal divide that

I had the opportunity to meet a young girl

who survived the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, and at that moment
experienced a disjunction between the ways our movement against the
war in Vietnam tended to represent war and the unimaginable suffering
the US military was causing the people of Vietnam. Today people refer to the
Haditha massacre that took place in November 2005, when US Marines killed fifteen
Iraqi civilians in their homes, as the contemporary counterpart to My Lai. But, despite
our flaws in that era, we did respond, we did rise up in massive numbers,
and we did take to the streets. As in previous historical periods, women were the key
placed war in an inaccessible past. Later, in 1973,

organizers of the anti-war movement, though they were not necessarily

the most visible spokespersons and frequently were unable to move past
the single-issue syndrome that focused only on ending the war. I am not
saying that today we are afflicted with a collective apathy that prevents us
from achieving the heights of activism that were decisive in bringing the
Vietnam War to an end. That is not my point. Indeed, it might be possible to argue
that popular anti-war consciousness is far more widespread in the USA
now in face of the war in Iraq than it was in relation to the war in Vietnam.
Yet I remain concerned about the failure to translate the vast antiwar
sentiment within the country into a sustained movement that can
effectively counter the imperial belligerence of the USA . If we are to reflect on ways
feminism can aid us in contesting the culture of war, I want to pose the question of how feminist approaches can

help us decipher the challenges we face today, which are, I believe, far more complicated than the challenges of
the Vietnam War era.

How can feminism help us to meet these contemporary

challenges?

Before attempting to answer this question, I should say that the tradition of feminism with which
I have always identified emphasizes not only strategies of criticism and strategies of transformation but also a
sustained critique of the tools we use to stage criticism and to enact transformation. This tradition of feminism is
linked to all the important social movements against racism, against imperialism, for labor rights, and so forth.

Just as it
was once important to imagine a world without slavery, to imagine a world
without segregation, to imagine a world in which women were not
assumed to be inherently inferior to men, it is now important to imagine a
world without xenophobia and the fenced borders designed to make us
think of people in and from a southern region outside the USA as the
enemy. It is now important to imagine a world in which binary conceptions
of gender no longer govern modes of segregation and association, and
one in which violence is eradicated from state practices as well as from
our intimate lives from heterosexual and same-sex relationships. And, as
in the past, it is important to imagine a world without war. And, of course,
this is just the beginning of the list. But it is not enough simply to imagine a
different future. We can walk around with ideal worlds in our heads while
everything is crumbling around us. Feminist critical habits involve collective intervention as well.
The feminist critical impulse, if we take it seriously, involves a dual commitment: a
commitment to use knowledge in a transformative way, and to use
knowledge to remake the world so that it is better for its inhabitants not
only for human beings, for all its living inhabitants. This commitment
entails an obstinate refusal to attribute a permanency to that which exists
in the present, simply because it exists. This commitment simultaneously drives us to
examine the conceptual and organizing tools we use, not to take them for
granted. This is the very core of feminism at least the feminism with which I identify. Of
This tradition of feminism emphasizes certain habits of perception, certain habits of imagination.

course, there are many feminisms, including the George and Laura Bush version, which evokes the putative status
of women under Islam as a rallying call for state terrorism. In this feminism, Islam within the Samuel Huntington
Clash of Civilizations framework produces the terrorist enemy of democracy and the victimized woman who has

a more radical, feminism exists, and with

it we can make gains in our efforts to end war, torture, and pervasive
militarization. This more radical feminism is a feminism that does not
capitulate to possessive individualism, a feminism that does not assume
that democracy requires capitalism, a feminism that is bold and willing to
take risks, a feminism that fights for womens rights while simultaneously
recognizing the pitfalls of the formal rights structure of capitalist
democracy. So, for example, this feminism does not say that we want to fight for
the equal right of women to participate in the military, for the equal right
of women to torture, or for their equal right to be killed in combat. This
feminism rejects, as I have heard Zillah Eisenstein relate, the claims of a US military
officer attending the graveside service of a female soldier killed in Iraq a
man who wept at what he spoke of as a palpable expression of womens
equality, the dead womans right to a military funeral. But even as we are critical of
an exclusive insistence on formal rights, we can consider other approaches to struggles for equality. Instead
of conceptualizing equality using a standard established by the dominance
of men in the military, we can advocate for the equal right of women and
men to refuse participation in the military. Moreover, we can extend our anti-military
advocacy to include the dismantling of the military machine, even within a struggle for equality. But the
larger issue here is the relationship between individual and collective
accomplishments. Victories achieved by individuals do not necessarily
count as collective victories. For instance, women of color who manage to reach the highest level of
to be saved by US democracy. But a more thoughtful,

government and who position themselves as architects and defenders of war do not advance the collective struggle

Rather their situation

militates against gender and racial equality. Feminism is concerned with
womens equality, it is concerned with gender equality, and it is also concerned with issues of
sexuality and race. But there may be something more important than the particular issues traditionally
of communities historically subjugated on the basis of race and gender.

associated with feminism. It may be far more important to emphasize feminist methodologies than the abstractions
that count as the objects of feminism. The importance of this approach is suggested by the history of feminisms in
the twentieth century a history that consisted largely of contestations over who gets to represent the abstraction

When I refer to
feminist methodologies, I include both scholarship and organizing in other
words, methodologies for interdisciplinary analysis, and also methodologies
for building movements. These feminist methodologies impel us to explore
connections that are not always apparent. They enable us to inhabit
contradictions and to discover what is productive about those
contradictions. These are methods of thought and action that urge us to think
things together that appear to be entirely separate and to disaggregate
things that seem to naturally belong together. Feminist scholar/activists present at the
women and particularly the raced and classed character of those representations.

2006 Feminism and War conference Zillah Eisenstein, Cynthia Enloe, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce
Pratt, and Jasbir Puar, for example have given us conceptual tools that are applicable both to research and to
organizing practices. There continues to be a need for the development that was so exciting at the conference
scholars talking to activists, scholar/activists talking to activist intellectuals about a whole host of questions raised

Feminist scholars and feminist activists attempt to

peer through the ideological veil. And feminists have always been in the
forefront of the peace movement. But as we now know, it is not enough simply to
call for peace. And peace cannot be envisioned as the simple cessation of
war. Aristophanes play Lysistrata was not only about the women withholding sex
from the male warriors in order to compel them to stop making war, it was
also about restructuring a gendered society.
by the current state of US wars.

Womens participation in the military has increased, but their

say in policy hasntincreased participation doesnt translate
to equality or effective policies
Eisenstein 08 (Zillah, One of the foremost political theorists and activists of our time. She has written
feminist theory in North America for the past 35 years, Feminism and War, Edited by: Robin L. Riley, Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, Resexing Militarism for the Globe, Chapter 2, p. 30-32, AO)

Women in the military may make the military look more democratic as
though women now have the same choices as men, but the choices are not
truly the same. So this may be a more modern military, if modern means
changed, but it is not more democratic or egalitarian. Actually, it is because
there is less democracy, if democracy means choice and opportunity, that
more women have joined the military. At present, this stage of patriarchy
often requires women to join the army in order to find a paying job or a
way to get an education. The military given this militarist stage of global
capital is a main arena where working- and middle-class women can find
paid work, as domestic labor was for black women in the 1950s. Given the
structural changes of labor in the global economy, marriage no longer affords
most women no matter their race or class life without paid labor. These
women are looking for ways to get medical and housing benefits,
educational resources, career training. These are significant shifts in womens
needs and lives, and in the institutions of marriage and family, which cut across
racial and class divides. According to Enloe, whereas women made up only 1
percent of the Soviet army, in post-communist Russia they made up 12
percent of the armed forces. In the USA during the Vietnam War women
made up 2 percent of military personnel and by 1997 constituted 13
percent. As of September 2003, 213,059 women made up 15 percent of

those serving on US active duty. Eighteen percent of new army enlistees were
women, 17 percent of the navy, 7 percent of the marines, and 23 percent of the air
force. Almost all say they joined for the education and job training. Over 50
percent of enlisted women are from ethnic minorities: 33.2 percent AfricanAmerican, 1.8 percent Native American, 4.1 percent Asian- American, and 10.2
percent Hispanic (Manning 2004: 7). The presence of women is also growing in the
militaries of Croatia, Mexico, Jordan, Resexing militarism for the globe Argentina,
Chile, Japan, and South Korea (Enloe 2000: 280, 281). In Iraq, one in seven
service members and one in three in the armys military intelligence
personnel is female (Burke 2006: 3). Young women make up a near-critical mass
in the Maoist movement in Nepal. This highly militarist movement is defined
by male leadership and female combatants. Nearly 30 percent of the Maoist
movement are women, and many of them find their military involvement both a
problematic and a liberating opportunity. These women are surrounded by
domestic and state violence so that the Peoples War gives them new
and different options. These militarized struggles reproduce and unsettle
stereotypic gender relations. Womens involvements are thought to be in
some sense emancipatory and yet constraining as the patriarchal relations
of their country are both in play and subverted by their mobilization
(Manchanda 2004: 237, 238, 245). It is important to note that the militarization
of womens lives is complex and disorderly. The military has offered
women entry before as a place of survival. Japanese-American women
signed up for the military during World War II to prove their loyalty and to
further their education. Brenda Moore writes about the Japanese-American
women who served during World War II. Many of these women saw military
service as an avenue of upward mobility, especially given their minority
racial status. Citizenship has been offered to immigrant groups in exchange for
military service. Six thousand Nisei children of Japanese immigrants, born in the
USA trained to serve with the military in the Pacific. An estimated 5000 Nisei men
were on active duty before the US declared war on Japan. After declaring war, most
of these individuals were denied the very rights they were willing to fight and die
for given the injustices of American racism. In the end, over 100,000 people of
Japanese descent were relocated to internment camps; approximately 80,000 of
these persons had been born in the USA. Some Nisei women in the end entered the
military straight from internment camps. And this was then used as a show of
democracy: the US army will open itself to even those of enemy
extraction. Nisei women broke the norms of both US culture in general and their
more private lives. Their desires were various: to use their particular skills
for the war effort, to prove their loyalty as US citizens, to see the world
(Moore 2003: 1, 3, 22, 30). African-American women suffered extreme stigma
and discrimination in the US military during World War II. There was a
racial quota of 10 percent and a policy of racial segregation was practiced.
African- American women were segregated into an all-black platoon and
were isolated from their white counterparts. Many of these women were
trained professionally but were assigned menial tasks simply because of
their race. Given this segregation there were African-American Women Army Corps
officers to lead their segregated units, but there were no officers among the Nisei
women. All Japanese-American women remained in the enlisted ranks (ibid.: 130
34). These women served their country both coffee and war.

A2: Aff Solves

Liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism are not gender neutral,
discussions of gender are critical to analysis.
Tickner 14 (J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 3, p. 45, AO)

International Political Economy (IPE) began to receive more attention in

international relations (IR) in the 1970s and 1980s after the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in 1971.
One of its foundational texts was Robert Gilpins The Political Economy of International Relations. In this text, Gilpin described what
he called the three constituting ideologies of international political economy:

liberalism, nationalism, and

Marxism (Gilpin 1987, chap. 2). Gilpin defined an ideology as a belief system that includes
both scientific explanations and normative prescriptions. Because none of these
ideologies discussed gender, we must presume that they are to be considered
gender neutral, meaning that they claim that the interactions between states and
markets (which is the limited way that Gilpin defined political economy) can be understood without
reference to gender distinctions. Feminists would disagree with this claim; just
as Marxists have argued that the world economy cannot be understood without
reference to class, feminists make similar claims about gender. Ignoring gender
distinctions hides a set of social and economic relations characterized by
inequality between men and women. Feminists would argue that in order to
understand how these unequal relationships affect the workings of the world
economy and their consequences for both women and men, an approach that
makes gender relations explicit must be constructed. In this chapter, I investigate whether

liberalism, nationalism, and Marxism are indeed gender neutral, with respect to their explanations and their normative prescriptions.
I examine the individual, state, and class, the central unit of analysis for each of these perspectives, to see whether they evidence a
masculine bias both in the way they are described and the interests they represent. If this is the case, then it is legitimate to ask

If there
is evidence of a masculine bias in these representations, we must ask whether
the normative preferences and policy prescriptions of each of these perspectives
serve the interests of men more than those of women.
whether and how gender has circumscribed each perspectives understanding of the workings of the world economy.

A2: Real World

IR ignores rape as a tactic of war.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 50 {Shoell}

Feminists have also drawn attention to issues of wartime rape. In the

Rwandan civil war, for example, more than 250,000 women were raped; as
a result they were stigmatized and cast out of their communities, their
children being labeled devils children. Not being classed as refugees,
they have also been ignored by international efforts .50 In northern Uganda,
rebels abducted women to supply sexual services to fighters, resulting in
a spread of AIDS; frequently, after being raped, these women have no
other source of livelihood.51 As illustrated by the war in the former Yugoslavia, where it is estimated
that twenty thousand to thirty-five thousand women were raped in Bosnia and Herzgovina,52 rape is not
just an accident of war but often a systematic military strategy. In ethnic
wars, rape is used as a weapon to undermine the identity of entire
communities.

Your notion of real-world is predicated on traditional

understandings of IR which perpetuate extreme violence.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 138 {Shoell}

IR feminists are frequently asked how their

research could help to understand real-world issues such as nuclear
proliferation or war in or between particular states. While denying neither that these
are important questions nor that feminists may have some useful answers to them, we must note that
these questions are framed in such a way that our understanding of the
meaning of real-world issues (in this case, the security of states) is taken as given.
When presenting their work to IR audiences,

Deciding which questions are important and which are not is significant because it defines what count as issues

The kinds of questions that IR feminists are

asking are often considered irrelevant for explaining real-world issues
or, at best, are judged as questions outside IR disciplinary boundaries, a
judgment that can have the effect of delegitimizing the subject matter of
the questions. As was evident at the womens-rights conference, feminists
frequently ask questions aimed at investigating conditions necessary for
achieving a more just world rather than those having to do with conditions
important for the preservation of stability. Questions are often framed in terms that require
worth researching and theorizing about.

investigations that begin at the local level, or level one, which, as I have suggested, is frequently judged by IR
scholars as less likely to yield useful explanations. A question with which feminists often begin their research is:
Where are the women?28 To ask this question is to reflect on whether we have taken as given which activities in the
international realm are deemed important for understanding international relations. Acknowledging that we need to
look in unconventional places not normally considered within the boundaries of IR, Enloe has asked whether
womens rolesas secretaries, clerical workers, domestic servants, and diplomats wivesare relevant to the
business of international politics.29 But, as Enloe notes, it is difficult to imagine just what these questions would
sound like in the arena of international politics and whether they would be taken seriously.30 Locating women must
include placing them within gendered structures. Typically, fem inist

research questions have to

do with investigating how the international system and the global

economy contribute to the subordination of women and other subjugated
groups. As previous chapters have shown, this may involve rethinking traditional concepts
such as security and the meaning of human rights. And, as my analysis of
democratization has demonstrated, it is often the case that womens life
opportunities tend to be constrained at times that traditional history has
marked as the most progressive.

Universalism bad
Economic globalization ignores the lived experiences of people
outside of the states target audience.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 76 {Shoell}
Challenging the pessimistic view of a world without alternatives, Richardsons more radical version of liberalism is

Rejecting the universalistic claims of

liberalism of privilege, this form of liberalism endorses the need for
greater attention to the specific local and historical conditions of each
particular development case. Richardson claims that the United Nations Human Development
concerned with justice and development from below.

Programme, with its preferred program of human development based on the satisfaction of basic needs, offers
pointers toward an alternative to the established orthodoxy. Yet, noting the widespread legitimacy of current liberal

radical
liberalism lacks a generalized strategy for achieving its preferred program
of human development. He also notes that a narrowing of the political
debate to issues of economic management has caused an erosion of
democratic political culture and a reduction in citizen participation . Many of
these critics of economic globalization have drawn attention to the disproportionate numbers of
women at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale, and to the feminization
of labor, the disproportionate burdens of structural adjustment on women
and children, and the consequent growth of womens social movements
protesting the detrimental effects of global capitalism. Yet these scholars
recognition of gender as a structure of inequality or of the growing
feminist literature on economic globalization has been slight. 44 Going beyond
orthodoxy and its near universal espousal by ruling global elites, Richardson has claimed that

traditional disciplinary boundaries and including issues beyond the agenda of conventional IPE, feminist approaches
generally fit within Denemark and OBriens definition of transdisciplinary IPE. I now turn to this literature to offer
some feminist perspectives on economic globalization and on the debates just outlined.

Universalism ignores hierarchal structures of class, race, and

gender.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 78 {Shoell}

Much of feminist analysis of economic globalization comes out of a

different ontology and different methodologies than those of neorealists
and neoliberals. Concerned with questions such as the global division of
labor, feminists have examined how hierarchical structures of class, race,
and gender cross and intersect with national boundaries; they also have
examined the interactive effects of these hierarchies on the workings of
the global economy. In so doing, they draw on sociological analysis rather than rationalist methodologies
based on microeconomics. Given their interest in understanding how culture, norms, and values shape and are
shaped by material structures, they are unlikely to choose rational-choice methodologies that focus on calculation

feminists are seeking to uncover hidden power structures

that reinforce unequal gender relations, making women visible should not
lead to portraying them as victims. Postcolonial scholars are reminding us that, too often,
of interest. While IPE

Western feminists have been complicit in generating knowledge that objectifies certain women and treats them as
problems.

They have also emphasized the importance of the local production

of knowledge, rather than relying on Western knowledge with its false

claims of universalism.49

Liberalism ignores the residual sexualized, racialized, and

class-based violence done in the name of progress.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 80 {Shoell}
Top-down visions of universality hide the extent to which the globalization of capital and finance is built on divisions,
often gendered and racialized, both within and between societies. Immanuel Wallerstein has claimed that racism
and sexism are mechanisms of exclusion whereby universalist values in practice become applicable only to an in-

challenging the
universality of globalization, Kimberly Chang and L. H. M. Ling see two
global processes taking place at once; the first, the liberal
internationalism or globalization from above, described by liberals; the
second, which is less visible, a globalization that is sexualized, racialized,
and class-based.54 This form of globalization from below refers to the movement of nonestablished labor
group that receives a disproportionate share of the systems rewards.53 Also

low-skilled and low-waged menial service provided by migrant workers, many of whom are female, particularly in

Women and girls are migrating as factory,

domestic, and sex workers, often moving from poor states to richer ones.
This migration of female workers is often the result of the need to
augment family incomes that have been declining due to the effects of
structural adjustment. Labor migration is increasingly female and racialized; often it is
coerced, with children being bought from impoverished parents; when
women, particularly minority women, move across boundaries, they find
themselves beyond the protection of the state. Absent from conventional accounts of
the domestic-service and lightindustry sectors.

international relations, these issues challenge mainstream understanding of space and territory; the interaction of

Feminist
discomforts with liberalism from above parallel those of other critical
perspectives that also see deeper structures of inequality that cannot be
solved by liberal faith in generating wealth through investment and trade
and assuming it will trickle-down to the less well-off. Complementing critical
theorys analysis, feminists look to deeper structures, such as the gendered
division of labor, to understand womens economic insecurities. Since so
many womens lives have been affected by changing labor markets, many
feminists have focused their analysis of economic globalization on labor
issues.
local and global becomes crucial for understanding the gendering effects of the global economy.

A2: #NotAllMen
Alt doesnt strive for a feminized society, rather a society in which
differences are less polarized/hierarchal

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 9, p. 124, AO)

American officials described the war against terrorism as a new kind of war, a
war against a terrorist network, not against another state. In conclusion, one may wonder
if there are other, more gendered ways in which this war is unlike the other wars
that Americans fought in the twentieth century. The prevalence of gendered
images taken to be threatening or used to belittle ones opponents could surely
be found in other such wars. But somehow these references seemed more
fundamental in this case. As quoted above, al Qaeda leaders made a special point of
criticizing Western gender relations. Gender relationships are an important aspect
of what are taken by many fundamentalists to be key religious or civilizational
differences. Even more surprising are the cases of strange bedfellows on different sides
of the war making the same kinds of gendered arguments. Do not these features of the
above analysis suggest that the 9/11 crisis reflected a globalization of gender
politics, a clash of gendered orders usually hidden by the normalizing practices of
unequal societies? In times of uncertainty, fear of social change rises, as does
fear of feminist agendas. However, feminists do not advocate a feminized
society, as some of their critics have suggested, but rather a society where
gender differences are less polarized and gender structures are less hierarchical.

A2: Walt
Walts analysis of international relations the epitome of
everything we criticize. He forwards universal understandings
of relations and ignores marginalized folks.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 44 {Shoell}

Walts defense of the social-scientific foundations of security studies

(mentioned earlier) and his dismissal of other approaches have drawn sharp
criticism from critical-security scholars. The ethnocentricism of his review
and his description of a field that appears closely allied with U.S. security
interests call into question his claim about the fields ability to rise above
the political and raises the issue of whose interest security is serving .
Edward Kolodziej has claimed that Walts philosophically restrictive notion of the social
sciences confines the security scholar to testing propositions largely
specified by policymakers; it is they who decide what is real and relevant.33 Kolodziej goes on to say
that Walts definition of science bars any possibility of an ethical or moral
discourse; even the normative concerns of classical realists are
deemphasized in order to put the realist perspective on scientific
foundations. Challenging Walts view of the history of the field as a gradual evolution toward an objective,
scientific discipline that ultimately yields a form of knowledge beyond time and history, Keith Krause and Michael

Walt has created an epistemic hierarchy that allows

conventional security studies to set itself up as the authoritative judge of
alternative claims;34 this leads to a dismissal of alternative epistemologies
in terms of their not being scientific. Critics claim that issues they consider important for
Williams have claimed that

understanding security cannot be raised within a positivist-rationalist epistemology or an ontology based on

a
realist-rationalist approach precludes consideration of an ethical or
emancipatory politics. For example, Krause and Williams contest realisms
claim that states and anarchy are essential and unproblematic facts of
world politics. They suggest that this worldview is grounded in an understanding of human subjects as
selfcontained as instrumentally rational actors confronting an objective external reality. This
methodologically individualist premise renders questions about identity
and interest formation as unimportant.35 These and other critics claim that issues of identity
and interest demand more interpretive modes of analysis. For this reason, critical scholars see the
necessity of shifting from a focus on abstract individualism to a stress on
culture and identity and the roles of norms and ideas . Such criticisms are being voiced
instrumentally rational actors in a state-centric world. In addition to constraining what can be said about security,

by scholars variously identified as constructivists, critical theorists, and postmodernists. While not all of them reject
realisms state-centric framework, all challenge its assumptions about states as unitary actors whose identities are
unimportant for understanding their security behavior.

Link XTTraditional IR
Traditional IR is steeped in neorealism and neoliberalism which
destroys the personal security of people deemed outside of the
states target audience.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg. 3 {Shoell}

In spite of the substantial growth and recognition of feminist scholarship

the last ten years, it still remains quite marginal to the discipline, particularly in
the United States, where neorealism and neoliberalism , approaches that share
rationalistic methodologies and assumptions about the state and the international system, predominate.8
Apart from occasional citations, there has been little engagement with feminist
writings, particularly by conventional IR scholars.9 There is genuine puzzlement as to

in

the usefulness of feminist approaches for understanding international relations and global politics. Questions
frequently asked of feminist scholars are indications of this puzzlement: What does gender have to do with
international politics and the workings of the global economy? How can feminism help us solve real world problems
such as Bosnia? Where is your research program?10 While the new feminist literatures in IR are concerned with
understanding war and peace and the dynamics of the global economy, issues at the center of the IR agenda, their
methodological and substantive approaches to these questions are sufficiently different for scholars of IR to wonder
whether they are part of the same discipline. 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

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
topics addressed that

the potential usefulness of feminist approaches raised by some of the questions above, I believe that they lie in the

feminist IR scholars see different realities and draw on different

epistemologies from conventional IR theorists. For example, whereas IR
has traditionally analyzed security issues either from a structural
perspective or at the level of the state and its decision makers, feminists
focus on how world politics can contribute to the insecurity of individuals,
particularly marginalized and disempowered populations. They examine
whether the valorization of characteristics associated with a dominant
form of masculinity influences the foreign policies of states. They also examine
whether the privileging of these same attributes by the realist school in IR
may contribute to the reproduction of conflict-prone, power-maximizing
behaviors.11 Whereas IR theorists focus on the causes and termination of
wars, feminists are as concerned with what happens during wars as well
as with their causes and endings. Rather than seeing military capability as
an assurance against outside threats to the state, militaries are seen as
frequently antithetical to individual security, particularly to the security of
women and other vulnerable groups. Moreover, feminists are concerned that
continual stress on the need for defense helps to legitimate a kind of
militarized social order that overvalorizes the use of state violence for
domestic and international purposes.
fact that

IR ought to begin at the local level, grounded in humanistic

social relations.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as

president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg. 4 {Shoell}
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 selfinterested actors; within a shared state-centric framework, neorealists and neoliberals debate the possibilities and

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
womens, as well as some mens, life chances and to prescribe ways in
which these hierarchical social relations might be eliminated. These different
limitations of cooperation using the notion of absolute versus relative gains.12

realities and normative agendas lead to different methodological approaches. While IR has relied heavily on

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
rationalistic theories based on the natural sciences and economics,

well be harder to reconcile than the differences in perceived realities discussed above.

IR is premised upon industrialization, nationalism, and

globalization.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg. 9 {Shoell}
Since its inception, at the beginning of the century, the discipline of international relations has gone through a
series of debates over both its subject matter and the methodologies appropriate for its investigations. 1 None of
these debates have been as fundamental as those of the last two decades. The end of the Cold War and the
plurality of new issues on the global agenda, to which I referred in my introductory chapter, have been
accompanied by increasing calls for rethinking the foundations of a discipline that appears to some to be out of
touch with the revolutionary changes in world politics, as well as deficient in how to explain them. Justin Rosenberg
has suggested that it is strange that momentous events, such as the collapse of Soviet Communism, the strains of
European integration, and the economic growth of China (which presently contains one-fifth of the worlds

events that are part of a gigantic world revolution of

modernization, industrialization, nationalism, and globalization in which
the West has been caught up for the last two hundred years, tend to be
excluded from most IR theory.2 Instead of what he claims are arid debates
about hegemonic stability or order versus justice, which abstract from
real-world issues, Rosenberg calls for theory grounded in historical and
social analyses. He suggests that global issues can be better explained through narrative forms of
population),

explanation rather than social-scientific methodologies of conventional IR. Such calls for rethinking the way in which
we explain or understand world politics began in the 1980s, with the so-called third debate in IR;3 the 1980s
marked the appearance of a substantial body of scholarship, associated with critical theory and postmodernism,
that challenged both the epistemological and ontological foundations of the field. Asserting that we had moved

from a world of states to a global community, R. B. J.Walker claimed that the third debate represented a
fundamental divide that went well beyond methodological issues because it arose more from what scholars thought
they were studying than from disagreements as to how to study it.4 While these concerns are obviously
interrelated, scholars on the critical side of the third debate challenged the foundations of the field as well as the
appropriate methods by which it should be studied. It is no coincidence that feminist theory came to IR, in the late
1980s, at about the same time as this fundamental questioning of the foundations of the discipline. Although there

IR feminists
pointed to the gendered foundations of the field and began to develop
feminist critiques of the major assumptions of the discipline. 5 Although their
had been earlier literatures on women in the military and on women and development,

definition of realworld issues might be different from IR theorists abstractions, they, too, were concerned with

Raising issues that

had rarely been seen as belonging in the discipline as conventionally
defined, they also preferred theory grounded in historical and social
analysis. Like the third debate in IR, feminist theory has also been engaged in a
critical discussion and reevaluation of epistemological issues . These debates
concrete issues embedded in what they claimed were gendered social relations.

began earlier, however, in the 1960s, when radical feminists challenged the empiricist foundations of liberal
feminism; in many ways, they were more genuine debates than those in IR, with scholars from a variety of
epistemological and disciplinary perspectives, ranging from the natural and social sciences to the humanities and

Questioning liberal assumptions that

womens subordination can be diminished by incorporating women into
existing institutional structures on an equal basis with men, postliberal
feminists pointed to hierarchical structures that would have to be radically
challenged to address these issues. They also claimed that knowledge
about both the social and natural world is not objective but based on the
experiences of men. Feminist IR scholars were drawn to this earlier interdisciplinary discussion. As had
other feminists in sociology, literature, and the natural sciences, they perceived IR as a field, largely within
political science, committed to universalist, positivist methodologies that, they
claimed, did not recognize its gendered foundations; nor did it speak to
the concerns that feminist scholars brought to their investigations. Identifying
philosophy, engaging openly with one another.

with the postpositivist side of the third debate, but critical of its silence on gender issues, feminist scholars went
outside the discipline to feminist theory to seek answers to their questions. In this chapter, I first outline some of
the approaches to feminist theory and some of the debates between themthe debates dating back to the 1960s.

how far the ontological and epistemological

concerns of feminist theory are from those of conventional international
relations and also why IR feminists have been drawn to them . I then briefly review
This survey is intended to demonstrate

some of the earlier debates in IR, thereby demonstrating their difference from feminist concerns. Finally, I introduce
some feminist IR perspectives, integrating them into the third debate. Althoughmuch feminist IR scholarship
demonstrates affinities with critical or postpositivist IR, its roots in feminist theory, and its commitment to the
importance of gender as a category of analysis, make this body of literature distinctive and different. In this
chapter, I focus on the epistemological and methodological issues raised by these feminist and IR debates, rather
than on substantive issues in world politics. These issues will be explored in subsequent chapters.

Alt Solves
Changing norms on an international level spills over
Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in residence at
the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined after fifteen
years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as president
of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female president of the
ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford University Press, A
Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 5, p. 71, AO)

While gender mainstreaming has made substantial progress in intergovernmental

and governmental circles, many problems remain. A policy imposed from above, gender
mainstreaming does not address the diversity of womens lives. The dominance of
the neo-liberal economic paradigm in international financial and development
institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, as well as institutional resistance and lack of
funding, are significant barriers against the types of transformational changes
that would be required to eliminate the kind of structural gender hierarchies that I
have documented in this chapter. The issue remains whether womens groups should seek
equality of women within existing frameworks or seek to challenge frameworks
such as those upon which the gendered constructions of the meaning of labor
that I described earlier are based. Changing norms and rules at the international
level can exert pressure on national governments to effect change . For, in spite of
the challenges to our traditional understanding of boundaries and territoriality
posed by the globalizing economy, it remains the case that states are still the
only institutions in the international system that are, or have the potential to be,
democratically accountable to their citizens. States are also the only institutions that have the power to
implement international norms or effect significant redistribution of economic resources. Given the enormous
distance between the extraterrestrial frontiers of global business where I began this
chapter, and the marginalized, and often invisible, spaces in which many women can be
found, feminists from all parts of the world have begun to rethink womens relationships to
the state. Increasingly, states are being seen as potential buffers against the detrimental effects of neo-liberalism and global
capitalism; it has often been the case that women have gained more power through the state than through the market. Jane

in order to be effective, womens organizations must work with

governments and explore ways to make bureaucracies more responsive to
womens concerns (Jaquette 2003, 343). In conclusion, I do not believe that women will be able
to travel in significant numbers to the extra terrestrial frontiers of globalization
until traditional gender expectations about the differing roles of women and men
are challenged and broken down. As I have documented, progress has been made, locally,
nationally, and internationally, albeit at different levels in different places . Building on
Jaquette has claimed that,

new opportunities of global communications, womens organizations and networks have been important vehicles for this progress.

much remains to be done before significant numbers of women (and of

course many men) can experience the benefits that proponents of economic
globalization believe exist
Nevertheless,

Alt key to joining women across lines of class, race, and cultural
variability.

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 9, p. 123, AO)

Issues of culture and religion have been difficult ones for both Western and nonWestern feminists. Western feminists have walked a fine line between supporting a global sisterhood, and
thus imposing Western definitions of female emancipation on other cultures, and trying to be culturally sensitive.

Third Wave feminism of the 1990s introduced issues of class, race, and cultural
variability into its analyses in order to get beyond essentialist generalizations

about women that stem from Western middle class womens experiences . As an
alternative to the universalism/relativism dichotomy, Nira Yuval-Davis (1997, 1) suggests what she calls
transversal politics, or the politics of mutual supporta form of coalition politics in which differences among
women are recognized and given a voice. In the Muslim world, womens struggles are frequently

undermined by the idea of one homogeneous Muslim world, a deliberate myth

fostered by both Occidentalism and Orientalism and promoted by interests within
and outside (WLUML 1997, 1). In many cases, to be pro-womens rights means to be accused of being
Western. Accusing women of being Westernized and, therefore, not representing an
authentic womens voice allows for the dismissal of womens claims to justice.
This has made it difficult for Muslim women to develop a discourse on their rights
independent of a cultural debate between the Western and Muslim worlds. Amiri
urges moving beyond the stereotypical premise that Islam as a whole is anti-woman. She suggests that, while it
is incumbent on the international community never to tolerate abuses against
women in any part of the world, the West should ground its support in the
positions of Muslim feminists. WLUML claims that women are frequently hampered by
insufficient knowledge about their legal rights, by their inability to distinguish
between customs, law, and religion, and by their isolation. To this end, WLUML suggests
that women pool information and create strategies across countries; they urge a
respect for other voices while condemning bad practices. All of these attempts to negotiate
support for womenattempts that get beyond a false universalism based on Western norms and a type of cultural
relativism that condones oppressive practices depend on seeing women as agents rather than victims .

Moving toward gender equality is a political processit requires new ways of

thinkingin which the stereotyping of women and men gives way to a new
philosophy that regards all people, irrespective of gender, as essential agents of
change (UNHDP 1996, 1).26

Feminist Geopolitics is key to challenging masculinist

conceptions of war - state based solutions only perpetuate
disembodied and unemotional relationships to war which make
it inevitable
Hyndman 8 (Jennifer, Jennifer Hyndman is Professor in the Departments of Social Science and Geography,
and is Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York. She received her Ph.D in Geography from the University of
British Columbia and her MA in Sociology from Lancaster University,Whose bodies count? Feminist geopolitics and
lessons from Iraq, Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, pgs 196)//JS
In exploring the politics of body counts, I employ the concept of feminist geopolitics as an analytical framing of

feminist geopolitics is an
approach to international relations that provides more accountable,
embodied ways of seeing and understanding the intersection of power and
space. I made the case then, and still contend, that it refers to an analytic that is contingent upon context, place,
and time, rather than a new theory of geopolitics or a new ordering of space. Specifically, feminist
geopolitics attempts to challenge the prevailing scales and epistemologies
of knowledge production in relation to international relations. It eschews
the state-centrism of dominant geopolitical commentary, the disembodied
epistemology of omniscient knowledge production, and the focus on
masculinist practices of militarizing states. Feminist geopolitical analyses
are more accountable to the safety of civilian bodies, traversing scales
from the macro-security of states to the micro-security of people, their
homes, and livelihoods. From the disembodied space of neo-realist
geopolitics, feminist geopolitics aims to recast war as a field of live human
subjects with names, families, and home towns. By representing war through various
permutations and incarnations of narrative, I have argued that feminist geopolitics offers more
epistemologically embodied accounts of war which more effectively
convey the loss and suffering of people affected by it. Affect is a powerful
substitute for ambivalence. Feminist geopolitics destabilizes dominant and
militarized violence and death in Iraq. In my two earlier papers, I argued that

often disembodied geopolitical discourse. People as much as states are

the subjects of geopolitics. While recognizing that the value of counting bodies in Iraq is not stable
over time or across space, common practices of reporting casualties have become so normalized that they at once
obscure and reproduce the workings of geopolitical power that frame these numbers and the stories for which they

I still advocate more relational ways of representing Iraqi

casualties, by linking Iraqis to North Americans in ways that go beyond
merely counting deaths and injuries. Counting bodies is important, but it
does not account for the remarkable destruction of lives and livelihoods
occurring in Iraq today. No metric or measure of trauma and violence
should dominate or silence peoples narratives of suffering and loss.
provide fodder.

Status quo preceptions of international relations will always lead to

bad policies, the alt is the only way to break free from the cycle of
ineffective international relations

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 9, p. 119-121, AO)

Fukuyama (1998) used his seemingly benign biological assertion that men are
warlike and women peaceful to justify the need to channel mens aggression into
activities in the political, economic, and military realms, thus diminishing
opportunities for women. Yet Joshua Goldsteins study of gender and war, discussed in Chapter
2, suggests that biology is in fact less constraining than culture with respect to the
roles that men and women can play in war and peace (Goldstein 2001, 252). But if men are
made not born, as Goldstein (2001, 264) claims, could we envisage a new form of hegemonic
masculinity less validated by a false biological association with war? Prior to
September 11, 2001, we in the United States were becoming accustomed to less
militarized models of masculinity. As described in Chapter 5, heroes were men of global
business conquering the world with briefcases rather than bullets : Bill Gates, a bourgeois
hero who looks distinctly unwarrior-like, amasses dollars not weapons.21 Robert Connell (2000, 26) depicted this
type of hegemonic masculinity as embodied in business executives who operate
in global markets as well as in the political and military leadership who support
them. Military heroes also were being defined in different ways: they came with a
tough and tender image a new definition of manliness, forged from the depths of sorrow and loss.22 Post
9/11 real men cried and tears were no longer a sign of weakness the ideal is that the
warrior should be sad and tender, and because of that, the warrior can be very brave as well.23 Peace researcher Elise
Boulding (2000) has suggested that men in the West are experiencing a great deal of
pain due to the questioning of their traditional roles, something that is probably
still true today. In this transitional era, so worrying to Kurth and Fukuyama, womens gains are unsettling
to many men and women, and mens role expectations have become more
complicated. This pain may be one reason for the post9/11 enthusiasm for old-fashioned masculinity and heroism.
Nevertheless, as Boulding claims, men do not necessarily enjoy these assigned macho roles . She
suggests that the Mens Movement has provided alternative roles for men; she hypothesizes that, with the diminishing
of gender polarities, there are possibilities for a new model of partnership rather
than domination. Sympathetic with these new challenges to gender identities and
assuming a strong social constructivist position, Robert Connell (2000, 30) has claimed that the
task is not to abolish gender but to reshape itfor example, to disconnect
courage from violence and to make boys and men aware of the diversity of
masculinities that already exist in the world. Democratic gender relations are
those that move toward equality, nonviolence, and mutual respect ; Connell claims that this
reshaping requires constant engagement with women, rather than the separation
that has been characteristic of contemporary mens movements. While Connell outlined
Francis

possibilities for shifting forms of masculinity freed from their association with war, Goldstein feared that rearing boys not to become
warriors puts them at risk of being shamed by their peers. And Judith Stiehm (2000, 224) has suggested that since women are
biologically capable of doing everything men can do, masculinity is fragile and vulnerable; because mens superiority is socially
rather than biologically defined, men need to assert and protect it. This makes shifting to new forms of masculinity a difficult task.

it is generally harder for men to cross gender lines than it is for

women. Do new forms of masculinity in times of war depend on opening up
spaces for new definitions of femininity? Clearly, womens increased visibility in
public life, particularly in the military, is shaking up gender expectations. In the
US military, women have fought and been killed in the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq with much less attention than in the Gulf War, where the presence of female
soldiers in Saudi Arabia was one of the greatest provocations for bin Laden .24 Yet
feminists have been ambivalent about women as war-fighterswhether they
should join mens wars in the name of equality or resist them in the name of
womens special relationship with peace. We must also ask what the presence of
women in combat ranks does to mens sense of masculinity as a motivator for
their war fighting. Judith Stiehm (2000, 224) has argued for ending mens monopoly on the
legitimate use of force, thus breaking the link between gender identity and the
use of state force. She believes this would reduce the overall use of force; she
sees peacekeeping as an activity that challenges the association of masculinity
with war. Suspicious of the association of women with peace and of any possibility
of remaking human nature, Jean Elshtain (1987, 352353) has suggested the notion of a
chastened patriot, a model that could be adopted by both women and men and
one that would shed the excesses of nationalism and remain committed to, but
detached from and reflective about, patriotic ties and loyalties. Understanding
gender as a social construction and the fluidity of gender identities allows us to
see the possibilities of change while acknowledging the power of gendering
distinctions to legitimate war as well as other practices that result in the
subordination of women. It is not only the gendering of war and peace that
constrains womens opportunities; frequently, women are oppressed in the name
of culture and religion, a phenomenon that the war in Afghanistan brought to our
attention.
And, as we know,

Peace cannot hope to describe the lives of people scripted

outside of the states notion of personhood. Removing military
presence will never be able to solve; we must radically alter
our IR to solve.
Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 62 {Shoell}
Questioning the role of states as adequate security providers, but being aware of their continuing importance as the
political category within which security is defined by policymakers and scholars alike, leads feminists to analyze

Rather than seeing

military capability as an assurance against outside threats to the state,
militaries are seen as frequently antithetical to individuals (particularly
womens) securityas winners in the competition for resources, as
definers of an ideal type of militarized citizenship, usually denied to
women,90 and as legitimators of a kind of social order that can sometimes
even valorize state violence. Simona Sharoni has suggested that, in states torn by
conflict, the more government is preoccupied with national security, the
less its citizens, especially women, experience physical security. 91 State
violence is a particular problem in certain states, but it must also be emphasized that many states,
although formally at peace, sustain huge military budgets at the same
time as social spending is being cut; this, too, can be a form of violence.
power and military capabilities differently from conventional security studies.

These feminist definitions of security grow out of the centrality of social relations, particularly gender relations, for

structural inequalities, which are central contributors to the

are built into the historical legacy of the modern state and
the international system of which it is a part. Calling into question realist boundaries
feminist theorizing. Feminists claim that
insecurity of individuals,

statecentric and structural analyses miss the interrelation of insecurity across

levels of analysis. Since womens space inside households has also been
beyond the reach of law in most states, feminists are often quite
suspicious of boundaries that mark states as security providers. Although, in
nationalist ideologies, family metaphors are used to evoke a safe space or sense of belonging, families are
not always considered a safe space for women. In most societies, families,
frequently beyond the reach of law, have too often been the site of
unsanctioned violence against women and children.92 Violence, therefore, runs across
between anarchy and danger on the outside and order and security on the inside, feminists point out that

levels of analysis. While these types of issues have not normally been considered within the subject matter of
security studies, feminists are beginning to show how all of these issues and levels are interrelated.

Alt SolvesCap
A feminist perspective of the international political economy key to
developing a feminist epistemology that is able to make liberalism,
nationalism, and Marxist more accessible to women.

Tickner 14

(J. Ann, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC, which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007; whilst she was not the first female
president of the ISA, she was the first feminist IR theorist to head the ISA, and just a badass in general, Oxford
University Press, A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Chapter 3, p. 51-52, AO)

the individual, the state, and class, which are the basic units of
analysis for the liberal, nationalist, and Marxist approaches to international
political economy, respectively, tend to present a narrowly masculine
representation. I have also suggested that the prescriptions that each of these perspectives
offers for maximizing economic welfare and security may work to the advantage
of men more than women. I shall now suggest how we might think about constructing a feminist
perspective that could offer us a less gender-biased representation of
international political economy and could represent the particular interests of
women. Such a perspective, coming from the position of those on the fringes of
the state and the market, might also help us to think about solutions to
contemporary global problems such as militarism, economic injustice, and
environmental degradation, which, although they have not traditionally been
central to the field of international political economy, are problems with which the
state and the market seem increasingly unable to cope. 4 A feminist perspective on
international political economy must be wary of discourses that generalize and
universalize from theories based on assumptions taken from characteristics
associated with Western men. Because, as I have shown, a masculine perspective is
embedded in the epistemological foundations of all three approaches, the
construction of a feminist perspective should include efforts to develop a feminist
epistemology. Only by so doing can hidden gender relations be brought to light
and an approach that takes gender into account both in its scientific explanations
and normative prescriptions be constructed. A feminist perspective on
international political economy might begin, therefore, by constructing some
alternative definitions of concepts, such as rationality, security, and powerconcepts that have
been central to our understanding of the field but have been embedded in a
masculine epistemology. Both the liberal and nationalist perspectives rely on a
depersonalized definition of rationality that equates the rationality of individuals and the state with a type of
instrumental behavior that maximizes self-interest. Both of these approaches assume that rational
action can be defined objectively, regardless of time and place. Most feminists
take issue with this definition of rationality ; agreeing with Marxists, they would argue that
individuals and states are socially constituted and what counts as rational action
is embodied within a particular society. In capitalist societies , rationality is associated with
profit maximization; thus, the notion of rationality has been placed in the public sphere of
the market and has been distinguished from the private sphere of emotion and
the household. Feminists argue that because it is men who have primarily occupied this
public sphere, rationality, as we understand it, is tied to a masculine type of reasoning
that is abstract and conceptual. Women, whose lived experiences have been more
closely bound to the private sphere of caretaking and childrearing, would define
rationality as contextual and personal rather than as abstract. In their caring roles,
women are engaged in activities associated with serving others activities that are rational
from the perspective of reproduction rather than production. A feminist definition of rationality would,
therefore, be tied to an ethic of care and responsibility . Such a definition would be
compatible with behavior more typical of womens lived experiences and would
allow us to assume rational behavior that is embedded in social activities that are
not necessarily tied to profit maximization.
I have shown that

Alt resolves neoliberalism.

Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 17 {Shoell}
Although all of these postliberal/postempiricist approaches have introduced the idea of womens ways of knowing,

Based on its
Marxist roots, socialist feminists define standpoint as a position in society
from which certain features of reality come into prominence and from
which others are obscured.26 Standpoint feminism presupposes that all knowledge reflects the
feminist standpoint as an epistemology was most highly developed in socialist feminism.

interests and values of specific social groups; its construction is affected by social, political, ideological, and

Womens subordinate status means that women, unlike men (or unlike
do not have an interest in mystifying reality in order to reinforce
the status quo; therefore, they are likely to develop a clearer, less biased
understanding of the world. Nancy Hartsock, one of the founders of
standpoint feminism, has argued that material life structures set limits on
an understanding of social relations so that reality will be perceived
differently as material situations differ. Since womens lives differ
systematically and structurally from mens, women can develop a
particular vantage point on male supremacy . However, this understanding can
be achieved only through struggle, since the oppressed are not always aware of their own
oppression; when achieved, it carries a potential for liberation. Hartsock argued that
womens liberation lies in a search for the common threads that connect
diverse experiences of women as well as the structural determinants of
these experiences.27 Similarly, Sandra Harding has argued that while womens experiences alone are not
historical settings.
some men),

a reliable guide for deciding which knowledge claims are preferable because women tend to speak in socially

womens lives are the place from which feminist research

should begin.28 Harding explores the question as to whether objectivity
and socially situated knowledge is an impossible combination. She
concludes that adopting a feminist standpoint actually strengthens
standards of objectivity. While it requires acknowledging that all human beliefs are socially situated, it
acceptable ways,

also requires critical evaluation to determine which social situations tend to generate the most objective claims.29

that feminist standpoint is rooted in a concrete reality

that is the opposite of the abstract, conceptual world inhabited by men,
particularly elite men, and that in this reality lies the truth of the human
condition.30
Susan Heckman avers

A Globalized Gendered Division of Labor sustains capitalism.

Tickner 01 J. Ann Tickner, feminist international relations (IR) theorist. She is a distinguished scholar in
residence at the School of International Services, American University, Washington DC,[1] which she recently joined
after fifteen years as a Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. Tickner served as
president of the International Studies Association (ISA) from 2006-2007 Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era. Columbia University Press New York. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data. Pg 81 {Shoell}
As they seek to explain womens disproportionate representation at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale in all
societies, feminists have drawn attention to a gendered division of labor that had its origins in seventeenth century
Europe, when definitions of male and female were becoming polarized in ways that were suited to the growing

The notion housewife began to

place womens work in the private domestic sphere, as opposed to the
public world the global economy of the market inhabited by rationaleconomic man; it was also coincidental with the growing separation of
mind and body typical of Cartesian thinking. Gendered constructs such as
breadwinner and housewifecentral to modern Western definitions of
masculinity, femininity, and capitalism have been evoked at various
division between work and home required by early capitalism.

times to support the interests of the state and the economy .56 Even though
many women work outside the home, the association of women with
gendered roles, such as housewife, caregiver, and mother, has become
institutionalized and even naturalized, thereby decreasing womens
economic security and autonomy.57 When women enter the workforce, they are
disproportionately represented in the caring professions or in light manufacturing industries, vocations, and
occupations that are chosen, not on the basis of market rationality and profit maximization alone (as liberal
economic theory assumes), but because of values and expectations that are often emphasized in female

Studying expectations about appropriate roles for women can

help us to understand why women are disproportionately represented in
the caregiving professions such as education, nursing, and social work .
Cynthia Enloe has claimed that a modern global economy requires traditional ideas
about womenideas that depend on certain social constructions of what is
meant by femininity and masculinity.58 However, in spite of these assumptions about
socialization.

appropriate gender roles, characterizing women as supplemental wage earners, estimates suggest that one-third of
all households are headed by women, about one-half of which are in the South, a fact that is frequently obscured by

Socialist feminists, in
particular, have emphasized how gender ideologies and structures as well
as market forces lead to low wages and double burdens. In the export-processing
zones (EPZs) of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, between 70 and 90 percent of
the workforce in the 1980s was female.60 Certain feminists claim that women provide an
optimal labor force for contemporary capitalism because, since they are defined as housewives
rather than workers, they can be paid lower wages: the assumption is that
their wages are supplemental to their familys income.Womens cheap
labor dates back to the first industrial revolution, in Britain, and is
particularly predominant in textiles and electronics and what are termed
light industries. Companies favor hiring young, unmarried women who can achieve a high level of
role expectations based on the notion that breadwinners are male.59

productivity at a low wage; these women are frequently fired if they get married or become pregnant. Because of
expectations associated with traditional gender roles, there is a belief that women possess nimble fingers, have
patience for tedious jobs, and sew naturally; thus, this kind of work is not seen as skilled and is remunerated

employers hire women

on the assumption that they will provide a docile labor force unlikely to
organize for better conditions.61 When women in factories making
sneakers in South Korea started to engage in unionizing activities, the
companies moved to locations with more authoritarian governments, such
as China and Indonesia. Faye Harrison has questioned whether workers in the South should be so
accordingly. Moreover, political activity does not go with female respectability;

under-rewarded. Receiving, on average, no more than one-sixth of the wages of their counterparts in industrial
countries, Southern women represent a cheaper-than-cheap labor force since they are usually rewarded at a lower

the interplay of
class and gender is integral to capitalist development at the national and
international levels.62
rate than men, who are themselves paid low wages. This leads Harrison to conclude that

Gendered Violence Advantage (Policy Teams)

The US military system as is will never try to eliminate rape
culturethe only way to solve is by rejecting the system
Dowell 8 (Leilani, She is a Marxist Editor and speaks on Uniting Women, LGBTQ, & Workers' Struggles as part
of a California statewide speaking tour, Violence against women: the US war on women, Feminism and War:
Confronting US Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, pgs 220221)//JS

Sexism, racism and homophobia are inculcated into the ranks by Pentagon
officials and these hatreds permeate military culture. Less than twenty
years ago, Marine Corps drill instructors routinely used such chants as
One, two, three, four, every night we pray for war. Five, six, seven, eight,
rape, kill, mutilate (San Francisco Chronicle 1989). According to a 2004 Nation magazine story, the
latest army basic training chant is What makes the grass grow? Blood, blood, bright red blood! (16 December

The level of violence against women GIs confirms the reactionary

character of the Pentagon military machine. Attitudes of arrogance,
superiority, and power over others are reinforced while soldiers are
conditioned to engage in violent behavior. The Pentagon will never do
2005).

anything to change what is essentially a rape culture in the military . The

Pentagon functions as an instrument of violence against oppressed
people, and as such cultivates a culture of violence that targets women,
people of color, and lesbian, gay, bi and trans people. And as the number
of women in the US military increases, the Pentagons violence is more
starkly exposed. Young women are joining in growing numbers seeking
jobs, skills and the means to support themselves and their children. More
than 59,000 female troops have been deployed overseas as part of the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.

Aff

No Link
No linkIR feminists vastly over simplify the diverse field of
international relations literature
Caprioli 4 (Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis

Mary Caprioli, Dept. of Political Science, University of Tennessee. International

Studies Review. Volume 42 Issue 1 Page 193-197, March 2004. http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/0020-8833.00076).
Conventional feminist IR scholars misrepresent the field of international
relations in arguing that IR scholarship as popularly accepted excludes
alternative explanations of state behavior, including feminist inquiry, that go beyond
structural, state-focused models. Feminist IR theorists, among others, critique the IR field for its state-centric
approach and argue that a world of states situated in an anarchical international system leaves little room for

they appear to
set up a straw man by refusing to recognize the variety within
conventional IR research. Indeed, as Jack Levy (2000) has observed, a significant shift to societalanalyses of social relations, including gender relations (Tickner 2001:146). As a result,

level variables has occurred, partly in response to the decline in the systemic imperatives of the bipolar era.
Certainly the democratic peace literature, particularly its normative explanation (Maoz and Russett 1993; Dixon

The
normative explanation for the democratic peace thesis emphasizes the
societal level values of human rights, support for the rule of law, and
peaceful conflict resolution in explaining the likelihood of interstate
conflict. Furthermore, dyadic tests of the democratic peace thesis rely on an emerging theoretical framework
1994), among other lines of inquiry, recognizes the role of social relations in explaining state behavior.

that may prove capable of incorporating the strengths of the currently predominant realist or neorealist research

theorizing and research in the

field of ethnonationalism has highlighted connections that domestic ethnic
discrimination and violence have with state behavior at the international
level (Gurr and Harff 1994; Van Evera 1997; Caprioli and Trumbore 2003a, 2003b).
program, and moving beyond it (Ray 2000:311). In addition,

A2: Realism Link

Uncertainty causes their realism linksLeaders will always
calculate action based on capability
Copeland 6, Associate Professor and Director Dept. of Government and Foreign

Affairs @ University of Virginia (Dale, The Constructivist Challenge to Structural

Realism: A Review Essay, Constructivism and International Relations, Alexander
Wendt and His Critics)
Notwithstanding Wendts important contributions to international relations theory, his critique of
structural realism has inherent flaws. Most important, it does not adequately address a
critical aspect of the realist worldview: the problem of uncertainty. For
structural realists, it is states uncertainty about the present and especially the future
intentions of others that makes the levels and trends in relative power such
fundamental causal variables. Contrary to Wendts claim that realism must smuggle in states with
differently constituted interests to explain why systems sometimes fall into conflict, neorealists argue that

uncertainty about the others present interestswhether the other is

driven by security or nonsecurity motivescan be enough to lead securityseeking states to fight. This problem is exacerbated by the incentives that actors have
to deceive one another, an issue Wendt does not address. Yet even when states are
fairly sure that the other is also a security seeker, they know that it might change its spots later on. States must
therefore worry about any decline in their power, lest the other turn aggressive after achieving superiority. Wendts

constructivist theoryand his bracketing of unit-level processesthus

presents him with an ironic dilemma. It is the very mutability of polities as
emphasized by domestic-level constructiviststhat states may change
because of domestic processes independent of international interaction
that makes prudent leaders so concerned about the future. If diplomacy
can have only a limited effect on anothers character or regime type, then leaders must
calculate the others potential to attack later should it acquire motives for
expansion. In such an environment of future uncertainty, levels and trends in relative power will thus act as a
building of a systemic

key constraint on state behavior. The problem of uncertainty complicates Wendts efforts to show that anarchy has
no particular logic, but only three different ideational instantiations in historyas Hobbesian, Lockean, or Kantian
cultures, depending on the level of actor compliance to certain behavioral norms. By differentiating these cultures

Wendts analysis reinforces the

very dilemma underpinning the realist argument. If the other is acting
cooperatively, how is one to know whether this reflects its peaceful
character, or is just a faade masking aggressive desires? Wendts discussion of the
different degrees of internalization of the three cultures only exacerbates the problem. What drives
behavior at the lower levels of internalization is precisely what is not
shared between actorstheir private incentives to comply for short-term
selfish reasons. This suggests that the neorealist and neoliberal paradigms, both of
which emphasize the role of uncertainty when internalization is low or nonexistent, remain strong
competitors to constructivism in explaining changing levels of cooperation
through history. And because Wendt provides little empirical evidence to
support his view in relation to these competitors, the debate over which paradigm possesses greater
in terms of the degree of cooperative behavior exhibited by states,

explanatory power is still an open one.

Alt Doesn't Solve

K turns itself associating men with war and women with
peace reinforces hierarchy.
Tickner 1 (J. Ann, prof at the School of International Relations, USC, Gendering World Politics: Issues and
Approaches in the PostCold War Era, p. 59-60) JM
In a context of a male-dominated society, the association of men with war and women with
peace also reinforces gender hierarchies and false dichotomies that contribute
to the devaluation of both women and peace. The 60 gendered dimensions
association of women and peace with idealism in IR, which I have argued is a deeply gendered concept,
has rendered it less legitimate in the discourse of international relations . Although
peace movements that have relied on maternal images may have had some success, they do
nothing to change existing gender relations; this allows men to remain in
control and continue to dominate the agenda of world politics , and it continues to
render womens voices as inauthentic in matters of foreign policymaking.

No Solvency focus on the state allows non-state actors to

elide scrutiny, activists support governmental responsibility
and NGOs are worse than the state
Binion 95 (Gayle, Poli Sci @ UC Santa Barbara, Human Rights Quarterly 17(3), p. 517)IM

the state is not the only powerful actor that wants to limit the
reach of human rights to only the "public" domain. The pressure to do so might
come as well from the "private" realm. Religious institutions and corporations,
for example, have much to gain in the preservation of their autonomy from the illusion of invisibility that
the two-spheres theory provides. If human rights concerns are focused solely on the
state because of a theory of the insulation of the family as "private," the false illusion of a [End Page 517]
dual-institution society is reinforced. Exceptionally powerful bodies beyond the familial
patriarchy thereby escape scrutiny. Employers (of women and men) who pay unconscionably low
It might be argued that

wages for work under inhumane conditions would be unlikely to want international human rights law brought to
bear against them. Religious orders with gender, race, or caste disqualification policies would similarly not
welcome such attention. Under the two-spheres theory of society these institutions do not exist, and their
practices are effectively shielded from international human rights review. Were women's experience the focus of
human rights law, attention to the nongovernmental sphere would be heightened, and patterns of social
organization and practices that are exploitative, not just of women and not just by familial patriarchs, but also
by other powerful bodies, would be brought into bold relief. 29 The denial of the existence of a "private" realm
of human rights violations is not limited to those with an apparent vested interest in the status quo. Human
rights theorists, such as Alston, not uncommonly fear the dilution of human rights principles if the realms are
expanded beyond the traditional. 30 Activist friends of human rights, such as Amnesty

International, slow to view women as victims of denials of human rights, have

held firm in their view that government must be seen as the perpetrator of the
violations in order for their organization to act . 31 Prominent feminist theorists often have
argued for only a very circumscribed realm of private human rights abuses. 32 The standard AngloAmerican Bill of Rights view of government as the uniquely powerful potential
evil-doer is as endemic in the traditional human rights nongovernmental (NGO)
community as it is among governments themselves. [End Page 518]

Alt Turn
Turn- Their alternative leads women away from politics and
engages in elitist criticism
Smith 94 [leading member of the US International Socialist Organization, 1994 Sharon, International
Socialism 62 Spring, http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=311]

rather than channelling women into greater political involvement,

consciousness-raising tended to lead women away from activity. The typical
But

consciousness-raising group lasted nine months, and most women left the womens movement after that. For many of those who

consciousness-raising became an end in itself. And it led to a turn

away from politics and an ever greater atmosphere of personalism within the movement. Even Redstockings, quoted
stayed,

above, dissolved itself within less than two years of issuing its manifesto. In the words of one feminist involved, When you stop
looking out, and turn exclusively inward, at some point you begin to feed on each other. If you dont direct your anger externally
politicallyyou turn it against yourselves.18 The politics of separatism exacerbated this tendency in organisations of radical
feminists. Although set up as non-hierarchical, the picture was hardly one of mutual support. Instead the atmosphere tended to be
intensely moralistic and extremely judgmental towards lifestyle. One woman who participated in a womens liberation group said

If [consciousness-raising is] all you do, then the enemy becomes

the enemy within. First they attack leaders, then lifestyle, then racism. Another described, In the name of
anti-elitism, they were trying to pull off the most elite thing possible . The
afterwards,

meeting ended with charges and counter-charges and a distinct lack of a feeling of sisterhood.19 Some womens liberation groups
carried the idea of lifestyle politics to an extreme, by forming living or other collectives based upon strict women-only guidelines.
One extreme such living collective was Bostons Cell 16, which demanded that every woman living there practise celibacy; only
one third of the women could be married; and any woman who had a male child was forced to give him up.20

Caprioli 4 (Feminist IR Theory and Quantitative Methodology: A Critical Analysis

Mary Caprioli, Dept. of Political Science, University of Tennessee. International

Studies Review. Volume 42 Issue 1 Page 193-197, March 2004. http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/0020-8833.00076)
If researchers cannot add gender to an analysis, then they must
necessarily use a purely female-centered analysis, even though the utility
of using a purely female centered analysis seems equally biased. Such
research would merely be gendercentric based on women rather than
men, and it would thereby provide an equally biased account of
international relations as those that are male-centric. Although one might speculate
that having research done from the two opposing worldviews might more fully explain international relations,

Beyond a
female-centric analysis, some scholars (for example, Carver 2002) argue that
feminist research must offer a critique of gender as a set of power
relations. Gender categories, however, do exist and have very real
implications for individuals, social relations, and international affairs.
Critiquing the social construction of gender is important, but it fails to
provide new theories of international relations or to address the
implications of gender for what happens in the world.
surely an integrated approach would offer a more comprehensive analysis of world affairs.

The alt cant solve material reality

Agarwal 98, Bina Professor of Economics, Institute of Economic Growth,
University of Delhi, Environmental management, equity and ecofeminism:
Debating India's experience, Journal of Peasant Studies, 25:4, 55-95

How does the ecofeminist formulation hold up in the light of women's experiences in the emergent community

experiences call to question the claim that the

women's movement and the environment movement both stand for
egalitarian, non-hierarchical systems. As this experience shows, an agenda for
'greening' need not include one for transforming gender relations; indeed
efforts at greening by male-biased institutions might sharpen gender
inequalities and (as noted) even bring threats of violence upon women. Second, in
institutions? To begin with, these

relation to the ecofeminist claim that women have a special stake in

environmental protection and regeneration, it is clear that women alone
do not have such a stake. Both women and men whose livelihoods are threatened by the degradation
of forests and commons are found to be interested in conservation and regeneration, but from different (and at
times conflicting) concerns, stemming from differences in their respective responsibilities and the nature of their
dependence on these resources. Men's interests can be traced mainly to the threat to their livelihood systems, their
dependence on the local forests for supplementary income, and/or their need for small timber for house repairs and
agricultural tools, which are their responsibility. Women's interests are linked more to the availability of fuel, fodder,
and non-timber products, for which they are more directly responsible, and the depletion of which has meant
everlengthening journeys. In other words, there is clearly a link between the gender division of labour and the
gendered nature of the stakes. The women I interviewed from some Gujarat villages were unambiguous about this:
Q: On what issues do men and women differ in forest protection committee meetings? A: Men can afford to wait for

women's concerns,
even if pressing, do not necessarily translate into effective environmental
action by the community or by women themselves. Case studies of several
autonomous forest-management initiatives in Orissa (east India) highlight both the gendered motivation for
forest protection and the unequal distribution of power which has enabled men's
interests to supersede women's: In most of the cases protection efforts started only when the
a while because their main concern is timber. But women need fuelwood daily. Third,

forest had degraded and communities faced shortage of small timber for construction of houses and agricultural
implements. Although there was a scarcity of fuelwood, it hardly served as an initiating factor [ISO/Swedforest,
1993: 46]. Although firewood is a household necessity and not just a women-specific one, since it is women's
unpaid labour that goes into providing it, any additional cost in terms of women's time and energy remains invisible

Women's own responses too are

far from automatic. The experience of an NGO in Rajasthan, working on the regeneration of village
or of insufficient importance to generate a community response.

commons, as described by Sarin and Sharma [1993: 122], illustrates this well: [TJhere is nothing 'automatic' in the
extent of women's active participation in the development of village common lands, no matter how acute their

Even in the villages where women took the

initiative and played a leadership role, this was preceded by enabling
them to interact with other women's groups ... Continuous interaction with [the NGO's]
hardship of searching for fuel and fodder.

women staff has been another crucial input for facilitating women's genuine participation. It is notable that even in
the Chipko movement, the specific incident which served as catalyst was the conflict between a sports goods
manufacturer who was granted government permission to cut a tract of oak forest and the village co-operative
which was refused permission to cut even a few trees for agricultural implements. The growing firewood and fodder
shortage that was causing women enormous hardship, did not elicit the same kind of response from the community
or from the women.37 These experiences are in keeping with the alternative theoretical perspective to ecofeminism
which I had spelt out elsewhere under the formulation, feminist environmentalism [Agarwal, 1992]. As I had argued

people's relationship with nature, their

interest in protecting it, and their ability to do so effectively, are
significantly shaped by their material reality, their everyday dependence
on nature for survival, and the social, economic and political tools at their
command for furthering their concerns. Ideological constructions of
gender, of nature, and of the relationship between the two, would impinge on how
people respond to the environmental crisis, but cannot be seen as the central determinants
of their response, as emphasised in ecofeminist discourse.38
then, and as the above discussion also indicates,

K is Essentialist
TURN: The kritik is essentialist, reproducing the exact
stereotypes produced under patriarchy
Whitworth 94 (Assistant Professor of Political Science York University 94 Sandra, Feminism and
International Relations: Towards a Political Economy of Gender in Interstate and Non-Governmental Institutions, p.
20)
Even when not concerned with mothering as such, much of the politics that emerge from

radical feminism within IR depend upon a 're-thinking' from the perspective

of women. What is left unexplained is how simply thinking differently will
alter the material realities of relations of domina tion between men and
women.46 Structural (patriarchal) relations are acknowledged, but not
analysed in radical feminism's reliance on the experiences, behaviours and
perceptions of 'women'. As Sandra Harding notes, the essential and
universal 'man', long the focus of feminist critiques, has merely been
replaced here with the essential and universal 'woman' .47 And indeed, that
notion of 'woman' not only ignores important differ ences amongst women,
but it also reproduces exactly the stereotypical vision of women and men,
masculine and feminine, that has been produced under patriarchy.48 Those women
who do not fit the mould - who, for example, take up arms in military
struggle - are quickly dismissed as expressing 'negative' or 'inauthentic'
feminine values (the same accusation is more rarely made against men).49 In this way, it comes as no
surprise when mainstream IR theorists such as Robert Keohane happily embrace the tenets of radical
feminism.50 It requires little in the way of re-thinking or movement from accepted and comfortable
assumptions and stereotypes. Radical feminists find themselves defending the same account of women as
nurturing, pacifist, submissive mothers as do men under patriarchy, anti-feminists and the New Right. As
some writers suggest, this in itself should give feminists pause to reconsider this position. 51

Essentialism (even when used strategically or for empowering

ends) leads to oppressive representations of identity
Producing classism, sexism and homophobia
Gosine 2 (Kevin Gosine, Brock University Sociologist, Essentialism Versus Complexity: Conceptions of Racial
Identity Construction in Educational Scholarship, CANADIAN JOURNAL OF EDUCATION 27, 1, 2002,: 81100,
http://www.csse.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE27-1/CJE27-1-06Gosine.pdf)
Researchers might consider employing postmodern perspectives to highlight the various ways individuals
negotiate, engage, and resist such collective identifications from the multiplicity of subject positions that
comprise a given racial community. Put differently, it is important to account for the unique ways different social
statuses continually intersect to complicate collective strivings for coherent racial identities. Although collective
or intersubjective forms of racial identity can frequently work to protect and empower racialized youth living

the imposition of defensively situated

(counter-hegemonic) essentialisms can be, as Yons (2000) interviews with Trevor and
Margaret illustrate, just as confining or oppressive as the negatively valued
representations that circulate within the dominant society . In both cases,
human subjects are objectified through the imposition of confining,
static labels a situation that provides fertile ground for intra-communal classism,
sexism, and homophobia. For this reason, it is worthwhile to explore the diverse
effects of these racialized communal forms of consciousness along with the multiplicity of
within a hostile, Eurocentric environment (Miller, 1999),

ways in which individuals negotiate and make sense of them. Accounting for intra-group division, ambivalence,
and rupture exposes the unstable and fluid nature of collective identities.

Framing
Framing through state action is the best way to break down
gender violence
Unger 12 (David C. Unger, author of The Emergency State: America's Pursuit of Absolute Security at All
Costs, Feb 16, 2012, http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=BfdbgjzJfagC&oi=fnd&pg=PP6&dq=
%22presidential+war+powers%22+%22policy+discussion
%22&ots=Z3pofxh_Ac&sig=AFVTmzmrrHXovUUvPWi0qb34yAw#v=onepage&q=%22presidential%20war
%20powers%22%20%22policy%20discussion%22&f=false)

The emergency state did not begin with the serial abuses of George W. Bush's presidency
from the Patriot Act to the cooked intelligence on Iraq, from Guantanamo Bay
to Abu Ghraiband getting America back on the course of constitutional democracy requires more than just
changing presidents. The record of Bush's two terms shows us just how much harm emergency governance has

our costly detour from America's traditional

democratic course began much earlier. The emergency state took on its present contours in
the days of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower. The Bush administration's
policies did not come out of nowhere; nor did the leading personalities who formulated them
done to America's ideals, reputation, and security. But

and ordered them carried out. Those policies, and those policy makers, came out of the experience, and the logic,

George W. Bush did not invent presidential war making

Truman did. He didn't invent extraordinary renditionBill Clinton did. He
didn't invent the theory of a unitary, sovereign executiveRichard Nixon did. Nor did
Bush invent the practice of selectively invoking, and distorting, classified
intelligence data to rally public support for dubious foreign interventions. Dwight
Eisenhower did just that to justify the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala. Lyndon Johnson did it to win
of the emergency state.
Harry

congressional passage of the 1964 Tonkin Gulf Resolution. The Bush administration did not do many things that
other administrations had not done before. It just did them more radically, more foolishly, and more unsuccessfully
than any recent predecessor. It was the Bush administration's failures on the battlefield and in the marketplace, not
its trampling of constitutional procedures and liberties, that eventually turned the American people and the

Before Congress was outraged, it was complicit. Before the

electorate rebelled, it approved. Before we threw those responsible for
these constitutional abuses out. we voted them in for a second term. And
three years into the Obania administration, emergency state thinking and habits
continue to damage our democracy, weaken our economy- and poison our international relationships. As a
Congress against it.

candidate, Barack Obaina talked eloquently about the importance of presidents acting in accordance with the

president, Obama
has addressed only a handful of Bush's most flagrant constitutional
abuses while building his core foreign policies around the familiar emergency state model. The
assumptions and institutions of America's emergency state have been
nurtured by thirteen successive presidential administrations, seven Democratic
and six Republican. Its practices and values have been sustained, and continue to
be sustained, by glib, overreaching formulas for national security that
politicians and foreign policy experts have trained voters to demand from
all candidates for national office.
Constitution and the rule of law. and promised a new relationship with the world. But as

The state is not inherently patriarchal reformism is a more

effective way to challenge patriarchy
Rhode 94 (Deborah L. Rhode, Law Prof @ Stanford, April 1994, Changing Images
of the State, 107 Harv. L. Rev. 1181)
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

Almost any
gender-related policy can be seen as either directly serving men's
serve male objectives by reducing female autonomy. n23 In effect, patriarchal frameworks verge on tautology .

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 Crosscultural 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

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
that struggle,

unitary patriarchal structure does more to obscure than to advance analysis. What seems necessary is a contextual approach that can account for
greater complexities in women's relationships with governing institutions. Yet despite their limitations, patriarchal theories underscore an insight that
generally informs feminist theorizing. As Part II reflects, governmental institutions are implicated in the most fundamental structures of sex-based

For
any subordinate group, the state is a primary source of both repression
and assistance in the struggle for equality. These constituencies cannot
be "for" or "against" state involvement in any categorical sense. The
questions are always what forms of involvement, to what ends, and who
makes these decisions. From some feminist perspectives, liberalism has failed to respond adequately to those questions
inequality and in the strategies necessary to address it. These tensions within the women's movement are, of course, by no means unique.

because of deeper difficulties. In part, the problem stems from undue faith in formal rights. The priority granted to individual entitlements undermines
the public's sense of collective responsibility. This critique has attracted its own share of criticism from within as well as from outside the feminist

rights-based claims have played

a crucial role in advancing group as well as individual interests. n32
Such claims can express desires not only for autonomy, but also for
participation in the struggles that shape women's collective existence.
The priority that state institutions place on rights is not in itself
problematic.
community. As many left feminists, including critical race theorists, have noted,

No Impact
Their patriarchy impacts are contrived, reductionist,
essentialist, and fracture resistanceThis ev is specific to
policy debate
Crenshaw 2 [Carrie Crenshaw PhD, Former President of CEDA, Perspectives In
Controversy: Selected Articles from Contemporary Argumentation and Debate
2002 p. 119-126]
Feminism is not dead. It is alive and well in intercollegiate debate. Increasingly , students rely on
feminist authors to inform their analysis of resolutions. While I applaud these initial efforts to
explore feminist thought, I am concerned that such arguments only exemplify the general
absence of sound causal reasoning in debate rounds. Poor causal reasoning results
from a debate practice that privileges empirical proof over rhetorical proof, fostering ignorance of the
subject matter being debated. To illustrate my point, I claim that debate
arguments about feminists suffer from a reductionism that tends to
marginalize the voices of significant feminist authors . David Zarefsky made a
persuasive case for the value of causal reasoning in intercollegiate debate as far back as 1979. He argued that
causal arguments are desirable for four reasons. First, causal analysis increases the control of the arguer over
events by promoting understanding of them. Second, the use of causal reasoning increases rigor of analysis and
fairness in the decision-making process. Third, causal arguments promote understanding of the philosophical
paradox that presumably good people tolerate the existence of evil. Finally, causal reasoning supplies good reasons
for commitments to policy choices or to systems of belief which transcend whim, caprice, or the non-reflexive
claims of immediacy (117-9). Rhetorical proof plays an important role in the analysis of causal relationships. This
is true despite the common assumption that the identification of cause and effect relies solely upon empirical
investigation. For Zarefsky, there are three types of causal reasoning. The first type of causal reasoning describes
the application of a covering law to account for physical or material conditions that cause a resulting event This
type of causal reasoning requires empirical proof prominent in scientific investigation. A second type of causal
reasoning requires the assignment of responsibility. Responsible human beings as agents cause certain events to
happen; that is, causation resides in human beings (107-08). A third type of causal claim explains the existence of a
causal relationship. It functions to provide reasons to justify a belief that a causal connection exists (108). The
second and third types of causal arguments rely on rhetorical proof, the provision of good reasons to substantiate
arguments about human responsibility or explanations for the existence of a causal relationship (108). I contend

debate privileges the first type of causal analysis. It

reduces questions of human motivation and explanation to a level of
empiricism appropriate only for causal questions concerning physical or
material conditions. Arguments about feminism clearly illustrate this phenomenon. Substantive debates
about feminism usually take one of two forms. First, on the affirmative, debaters argue that some
aspect of the resolution is a manifestation of patriarchy . For example, given the
that the practice of intercollegiate

spring 1992 resolution, [rjesolved: That advertising degrades the quality of life," many affirmatives argued that the
portrayal of women as beautiful objects for men's consumption is a manifestation of patriarchy that results in

The fall 1992 topic, "(rjesolved:

That the welfare system exacerbates the problems of the urban poor in
the United States," also had its share of patri- archy cases. Affirmatives
typically argued that women's dependence upon a patriarchal welfare
system results in increasing rates of women's poverty. In addition to these concrete harms to individual
tangible harms to women such as rising rates of eating disorders.

women, most affirmatives on both topics, desiring "big impacts," argued that the effects of patriarchy include

nightmarish totalitarianism and/or nuclear annihilation. On the negative, many debaters countered with
arguments that the some aspect of the resolution in some way sustains or energizes the feminist movement in
resistance to patriarchal harms. For example, some negatives argued that sexist advertising provides an impetus
for the reinvigoration of the feminist movement and/or feminist consciousness, ultimately solving the threat of
patriarchal nuclear annihilation. likewise, debaters negating the welfare topic argued that the state of the welfare
system is the key issue around which the feminist movement is mobilizing or that the consequence of the welfare

Such arguments
seem to have two assumptions in common. First, there is a single
feminism. As a result, feminists are transformed into feminism. Debaters speak of feminism as
a single, monolithic, theoretical and pragmatic entity and feminists as women with identical
motivations, methods, and goals. Second, these arguments assume that patriarchy is
system - breakup of the patriarchal nuclear family -undermines patriarchy as a whole.

the single or root cause of all forms of oppression . Patriarchy not only is responsible for
sexism and the consequent oppression of women, it also is the cause of totalitarianism, environmental degradation,

These reductionist arguments reflect an

unwillingness to debate about the complexities of human motivation and
nuclear war, racism, and capitalist exploitation.

explanation. They betray a reliance upon a framework of proof that can explain only material conditions and
physical realities through empirical quantification. The transformation of feminists 'Mo feminism and the
identification of patriarchy as the sole cause of all oppression is related in part to the current form of intercollegiate
debate practice. By "form," I refer to Kenneth Burke's notion of form, defined as the "creation of appetite in the
mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of that appetite" (Counter-Statement 31). Though the framework
for this understanding of form is found in literary and artistic criticism, it is appropriate in this context; as Burke
notes, literature can be "equipment for living" (Biilosophy 293). He also suggests that form "is an arousing and
fulfillment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be
gratified by the sequence" (Counter-Statement 124). Burke observes that there are several aspects to the concept
of form. One of these aspects, conventional form, involves to some degree the appeal of form as form. Progressive,
repetitive, and minor forms, may be effective even though the reader has no awareness of their formality. But when
a form appeals as form, we designate it as conventional form. Any form can become conventional, and be sought
for itself - whether it be as complex as the Greek tragedy or as compact as the sonnet (Counter-Statement 126).
These concepts help to explain debaters' continuing reluctance to employ rhetorical proof in arguments about
causality. Debaters practice the convention of poor causal reasoning as a result of judges' unexamined reliance
upon conventional form. Convention is the practice of arguing single-cause links to monolithic impacts that arises
out of custom or usage. Conventional form is the expectation of judges that an argument will take this form.
Common practice or convention dictates that a case or disadvantage with nefarious impacts causally related to a
single link will "outweigh" opposing claims in the mind of the judge. In this sense, debate arguments themselves are
conventional. Debaters practice the convention of establishing single-cause relationships to large monolithic
impacts in order to conform to audience expectation. Debaters practice poor causal reasoning
because they are rewarded for it by judges. The convention of arguing single-cause links leadsthe judge to
anticipate the certainty of the impact and to be gratified by the sequence. I suspect that the sequence is gratifying
for judges because it relieves us from the responsibility and difficulties of evaluating rhetorical proofs. We are
caught between our responsibility to evaluate rhetorical proofs and our reluctance to succumb to complete
relativism and subjectivity. To take responsibility for evaluating rhetorical proof is to admit that not every question
has an empirical answer. However, when we abandon our responsibility to rhetorical proofs, we sacrifice our
students' understanding of causal reasoning. The sacrifice has consequences for our students' knowledge of the
subject matter they are debating. For example, when feminism is defined as a single entity ,
not as a pluralized movement or theory, that single entity results in the identification of patriarchy as the sole cause

The result is ignorance of the subject position of the particular

feminist author, for highlighting his or her subject position might draw attention to the incompleteness of
the causal relationship between link and impact Consequently, debaters do not challenge
the basic assumptions of such argumentation and ignorance of feminists
is perpetuated. Feminists are not feminism. The topics of feminist inquiry are many and varied, as are the
of oppression.

philosophical approaches to the study of these topics. Different authors have attempted categorization of various
feminists in distinctive ways. For example, Alison Jaggar argues that feminists can be divided into four categories:
liberal feminism, marxist feminism, radical feminism, and socialist feminism. While each of these feminists may
share a common commitment to the improvement of women's situations, they differ from each other in very
important ways and reflect divergent philosophical assumptions that make them each unique. Linda Alcoff presents
an entirely different categorization of feminist theory based upon distinct understandings of the concept "woman,"
including cultural feminism and post-structural feminism. Karen Offen utilizes a comparative historical approach to
examine two distinct modes of historical argumentation or discourse that have been used by women and their male
allies on behalf of women's emancipation from male control in Western societies. These include relational feminism
and individualist feminism. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron describe a whole category of French feminists
that contain many distinct versions of the feminist project by French authors. Women of color and third-world

broad categorizations of the various feminism

have neglected the contributions of non-white, non-Western feminists (see,
feminists have argued that even these

for example, hooks; Hull; Joseph and Lewis; Lorde; Moraga; Omolade; and Smith). In this literature, the very
definition of feminism is contested. Some feminists argue that "all feminists are united by a commitment to
improving the situation of women" (Jaggar and Rothenberg xii), while others have resisted the notion of a single
definition of feminism, bell hooks observes, "a central problem within feminist discourse has been our inability to
either arrive at a consensus of opinion about what feminism is (or accept definitions) that could serve as points of
unification" (Feminist Theory 17). The controversy over the very definition of feminism has political implications.
The power to define is the power both to include and exclude people and ideas in and from that feminism. As a
result, [bjourgeois white women interested in women's rights issues have been satisfied with simple definitions for
obvious reasons. Rhetorically placing themselves in the same social category as oppressed women, they were not

Debate arguments
that assume a singular conception of feminism include and empower the
voices of race- and class-privileged women while excluding and silencing
the voices of feminists marginalized by race and class status. This position
anxious to call attention to race and class privilege (hooks. Feminist Wieory 18).

becomes clearer when we examine the second assumption of arguments about feminism in intercollegiate debate patriarchy is the sole cause of oppression. Important feminist thought has resisted this assumption for good reason .

Designating patriarchy as the sole cause of oppression allows the

subjugation of resistance to other forms of oppression like racism and classism to the

struggle against sexism. Such subjugation has the effect of denigrating the legitimacy of resistance to racism and
classism as struggles of equal importance. "Within feminist movement in the West, this led to the assumption that
resisting patriarchal domination is a more legitimate feminist action than resisting racism and other forms of
domination" (hooks. Talking Back 19). The relegation of struggles against racism and class exploitation to offspring
status is not the only implication of the "sole cause" argument In addition, identifying patriarchy as the single
source of oppression obscures women's perpetration of other forms of subjugation and domination, bell hooks
argues that we should not obscure the reality that women can and do partici- pate in politics of domination, as
perpetrators as well as victims - that we dominate, that we are dominated. If focus on patriarchal domination masks
this reality or becomes the means by which women deflect attention from the real conditions and circumstances of
our lives, then women cooperate in suppressing and promoting false consciousness, inhibiting our capacity to

Characterizing
patriarchy as the sole cause of oppression allows mainstream feminists to
abdicate responsibility for the exercise of class and race privilege. It casts the
assume responsibility for transforming ourselves and society (hooks. Talking Back 20).

struggle against class exploitation and racism as secondary concerns. Current debate practice promotes ignorance
of these issues because debaters appeal to conventional form, the expectation of judges that they will isolate a
single link to a large impact Feminists become feminism and patriarchy becomes the sole cause of all evil. Poor
causal arguments arouse and fulfill the expectation of judges by allowing us to surrender our responsibility to
evaluate rhetorical proof for complex causal relationships .

The result is either the mar-

ginalization or colonization of certain feminist voices. Arguing feminism in debate rounds risks trivializing

feminists. Privileging the act of speaking about feminism over the content of speech "often turns the voices and
beings of non-white women into commodity, spectacle" (hooks, Talking Back 14). Teaching sophisticated causal
reasoning enables our students to learn more concerning the subject matter about which they argue. In this case,
students would learn more about the multiplicity of feminists instead of reproducing the marginalization of many
feminist voices in the debate itself. The content of the speech of feminists must be investigated to subvert the
colonization of exploited women. To do so, we must explore alternatives to the formal expectation of single-cause
links to enormous impacts for appropriation of the marginal voice threatens the very core of self-determination and
free self-expression for exploited and oppressed peoples. If the identified audience, those spoken to, is determined
solely by ruling groups who control production and distribution, then it is easy for the marginal voice striving for a
hearing to allow what is said to be overdetermined by the needs of that majority group who appears to be listening,
to be tuned in (hooks, Talking Back 14

Democracy and economic liberalization checks their impacts

OKane 97 (Modernity, the Holocaust, and politics, Economy and Society,
February, ebsco)

Chosen policies cannot be relegated to the position of immediate condition (Nazis in power) in the explanation of

Modern bureaucracy is not intrinsically capable of genocidal

action (Bauman 1989: 106). Centralized state coercion has no natural
move to terror. In the explanation of modern genocides it is chosen policies which play the greatest
the Holocaust.

part, whether in effecting bureaucratic secrecy, organizing forced labour, implementing a system of terror,

As Nazi
Germany and Stalins USSR have shown, furthermore, those chosen
policies of genocidal government turned away from and not towards
modernity. The choosing of policies,however, is not independent of circumstances. An analysis of the history
harnessing science and technology or introducing extermination policies, as means and as ends.

of each case plays an important part in explaining where and how genocidal governments come to power and
analysis of political institutions and structures also helps towards an understanding of the factors which act as
obstacles to modern genocide. But it is not just political factors which stand in the way of another Holocaust in

Modern societies have not only pluralist democratic political

systems but also economic pluralism where workers are free to change
jobs and bargain wages and where independent firms, each with their own
independent bureaucracies, exist in competition with state-controlled
enterprises. In modern societies this economic pluralism both promotes and is served by the open scientific
modern society.

method. By ignoring competition and the capacity for people to move between organizations whether economic,
political, scientific or social, Bauman overlooks crucial but also very ordinary and common attributes of truly

It is these very ordinary and common attributes of modernity

which stand in the way of modern genocides.
modern societies.

Turn: War causes patriarchy

Goldstein 1 (Joshua Goldstein, Intl Rel Prof @ American U, 2001, War and

Gender, p. 412)
First, peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and
working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the
approach, if you want peace, work for justice. Then, if one believes
that sexism contributes to war one can work for gender justice
specifically (perhaps among others) in order to pursue peace. This
approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor, minorities), but rests on the
assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this book suggests
that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a
product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any
other single cause, although all of these influence wars outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war
has in part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So,if you
want peace, work for peace. Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others),
work for peace. Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of
individuals, societies, and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in
attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way
to reverse womens oppression. The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings
to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this books evidence, the emphasis
on injustice as the main cause of war seems to be empirically inadequate.

Intersectionalality Turn
Kritiks focus on patriarchy ignores the role race and social
status plays in creation of oppression
Noh, 3 (assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University, Fullerton, 2003 [Eliza,
Problematics of Transnational Feminism for Asian American Women, The New Centennial Review 3.3, Project Muse,
Stevens])

there exist "various forms and

of patriarchal oppression, some of which we share [with white
women], and some of which we do not" (Lorde 1983b, 97). The experiences of Asian American
women show that sexual domination cannot be separated from other
oppressions, unless one takes a narrow view of gendered experience
within our "traditional" cultures. In his important work, "The Sexual Demon of White Power . . . in
Pluralizing "women's oppression" cannot get around the fact that
degrees

'America' and Beyond" (1999), Greg Thomas thoroughly elaborates processes of sexualization via racialization and

the inadequacy of
feminism to account for multiple, simultaneous oppressions, in particular
the centrality of experiences of racialization and coloniality to
sexualization, is precisely why different gender identities, such as "womanist,"
become necessary. This is also why the Combahee River Collective (1983) uses
the term "racial-sexual oppression""which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the
coloniality that challenge the notion of universal sex. Within this framework,

history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression" (213). In the classes where I have
worked with Asian American women and other women of color, I often hear it stated that they cannot imagine
identifying first with [End Page 141] white women on the basis of gender or sex over their cultural communities on
the basis of ethnicity or race. I think that this does not necessarily reflect a nave ranking of race over gender, but
the predominant experiential reality of racialized sex for nonwhite women. The implications of transnational
feminism for Asian/American 15 women create artificial solidarities with white women where there may not be a

Even if a contingent similarity exists

between womenwhere Asian-based, patriarchal sex- gender systems
claim Asian American women just as European-based patriarchies claim
white, Anglo womenit is important to look at the specificities of these
relationships within their own contexts. The different racial and gender experiences of Asian
common ground, whether subjectively or sociopolitically.

women may separate, on the basis of race and sex, Asian feminine subjects as far apart from white femininity as
they may be from Asian masculine subjects.

This dooms the Konly differentiating the ways in which

patriarchal violence is located can create true solidarity
Noh 3 (assistant professor of Asian American studies at California State University, Fullerton, 2003 [Eliza,
Problematics of Transnational Feminism for Asian American Women, The New Centennial Review 3.3, Project Muse,
Stevens])
I would like to investigate briefly the desire fueling transnational feminism's attempt to create alliances across
boundaries, by looking at the ramifications of travel as elaborated in transnational feminist theories. In an era of
cyberspace and jet travel, defining one's location 18 can demystify notions of difference and similarity associated
with postmodernist accounts of border-crossing (Kaplan 1994, 138). But

when I think of what a

feminist colleague said to me about the

apparent academic anachronism of "1980s

politics," after the arrival of postmodern feminist "identity

women-of-color feminist identity

19
deconstructionism," I glimpse the backlash against Third-World women's organizing,
and the limits of
simply questioning one's location as one travels without addressing the
continuing material and subjective barriers that differentiate at least a vast half of
the world's population. If identity politics represent "essentialist," and therefore
politically "unsophisticated" tools for making interpersonal connections, compared to the mechanisms of selfcritique implicit in fluid, postmodern identities, what happens after deconstruction? Does

historicizing location make travel easier while subjective and material barriers
20
remain? I was reminded of this distance, if not rupture, in subjectivity and experience by

the reactions of white feminists at an international women's studies conference

where I first presented this paper. I watched their facial expressions change from amusement

to disdain as they realized I was propounding the importance of Asian feminist

nationalism as a critique of "transnational" feminist erasures . While the few Asian women
in the room expressed agreement with my ideas, I was not surprised that in this instance, like many others, some
white women "just didn't get it." We must deconstruct and historicize the reasons for our
divergences, but it seems that crossing lines would ncessitate overcoming, in actuality,
those histories of subjective and material barriers. This remains an incredibly difficult
task, since people are so entrenched in their material and subjective (conscious and
unconscious) investments in relations of power . In my opinion, oppositional identity

politics continue to be necessary insofar as intersubjectivity operates purely as

an intellectual exercise, and not as an active commitment to destroying the
hegemony of certain cultural egos. As Moraga (1983) states, we must decide to "make faith a reality

and to bring all of our selves to bear down hard on that reality" (xix). Making international connections and
mobilizations is important to Asian American women concerned with progressive theory and practice because our
lives are already linked with other national contexts through imperialism, migration, labor, race, and culture.
Therefore, feminist nationalist consciousness cannot afford to take a myopic approach to issues that seem to affect
us only within the national, domestic sphere. Neither can Asian American cultural struggle take a transcendental
view of internationalism, for often official state nationalisms collude, serving state interests in the name of
internationalism or transnationalism. A similar warning can be made about transnational

feminist projects, which must be grounded through tracking histories of cultural

difference and rupture. Without a critical eye honed from collective cultural
experiences of material conditions, the commitment to a different practice of
feminism cannot seem to move beyond a superficial level of emotional
investment.

The alternatives gender alone focus reinforces the

dominant paradigms they attempt to fight
Crenshaw 91 (Kimberlie Crenshaw, 91. professor of law @ UCLA, 1991. (Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, July, 43 Stan. L. Rev.
1241, L/N))
The concept of political intersectionality highlights the fact that women of color are situated within at least two subordinated groups

The need to split one's political energies

between two sometimes opposing groups is a dimension of intersectional
disempowerment that men of color and white women seldom confront . Indeed,
their specific raced and gendered experiences, although intersectional, often define as well as confine the interests of
that frequently pursue conflicting political agendas.

the entire group. For example, racism as experienced by people of color who are of a particular gender -- male -- tends to determine
the parameters of antiracist strategies, just as sexism as experienced by women who are of a particular race -- white -- tends to
ground the women's movement. The problem is not simply that both discourses fail women of color by not acknowledging the

the discourses are often inadequate even to

the discrete tasks of articulating the full dimensions of racism and sexism .
Because women of color experience racism in ways not always the same as those experienced by men of color
and sexism in ways not always parallel to experiences of white women,
antiracism and feminism are limited, even on their own terms. Among the most troubling political
"additional" issue of race or of patriarchy but that

consequences of the failure of antiracist and feminist discourses to address the intersections of race and gender is the fact that, to

one analysis often

implicitly denies the validity of the other. The failure of feminism to interrogate
race means that the resistance strategies of feminism will often replicate
and reinforce the subordination of people of color, and the failure of antiracism to interrogate
the extent they can forward the interest of "people of color" and "women," respectively,

patriarchy means that antiracism will frequently reproduce the subordination of women. These mutual elisions present a particularly
difficult political dilemma for women of color. Adopting either analysis constitutes a denial of a fundamental dimension of our
subordination and precludes the development of a political discourse that more fully empowers women of color.

Realism
only realism can prevent the rise of Hitlerite states
Copeland 6, Associate Professor and Director Dept. of Government and Foreign
Affairs @ University of Virginia (Dale, The Constructivist Challenge to Structural
Realism: A Review Essay, Constructivism and International Relations, Alexander
Wendt and His Critics)
Second, Wendts view is inconsistent with his recognition that states often do have difficulty learning
about the other. The very problem Ego and Alter have in first communicating
is that behavior does not speak for itself. It must be interpreted, and
many interpretations are possible (330). This point is reinforced by Wendts
epistemological point of departure: that the ideas held by actors are
unobservable (chap. 2). Because leaders cannot observe directly what the other
is thinking, they are resigned to making inferences from its behavior. Yet
in security affairs, as Wendt acknowledges, mistakes in inferencesassuming the
other is peaceful when in fact it has malevolent intentionscould prove
fatal (360). Wendt accepts that the problem facing rational states is making sure that they perceive other
actors, and other actors perception of them, correctly (334, emphasis in original). Yet the book provides no
mechanism through which Ego and Alter can increase their confidence in the correctness of their estimates of the

Simply describing how Ego and Alter shape each others sense of
self and other is not enough.21 Rational choice models, using assumptions consistent
with structural realism, do much better here. In games of incomplete information, where states are unsure
others type.

about the others type, actions by security-seeking actors that would be too costly for greedy actors to adopt can

Wendt
cannot simply argue that over time states can learn a great deal about
other states. It is what is not shared, at least in the area of intentions,
that remains the core stumbling block to cooperation . Third, Wendts position
that the problem of other minds is not much of a problem ignores a fundamental issue in all social relations, but
especially in those between states, namely, the problem of deception. In making estimates of the others
present type, states have reason to be suspicious of its diplomatic gestures
the other may be trying to deceive them. Wendts analysis is rooted in the theory of symbolic
help states reduce their uncertainty about present intentions, thus moderating the security dilemma.22

interactionism, but he does not discuss one critical aspect of that tradition: the idea of impression management.

Actors in their relations exploit the problem of other minds for their own
ends. On the public stage, they present images and play roles that often
have little to do with their true beliefs and interests backstage.23 In laying out his

dramaturgical view of Ego and Alter co-constituting each others interests and identities, Wendt assumes that both
Ego and Alter are making genuine efforts to express their true views and to cast the other in roles that they

deceptive actors will stage-manage the situation to create

impressions that serve their narrow ends, and other actors, especially in
world politics, will understand this.24 Thus a prudent security-seeking Ego
will have difficulty distinguishing between two scenarios: whether it and
Alter do indeed share a view of each other as peaceful, or whether Alter is
just pretending to be peaceful in order to make Ego think that they share
a certain conception of the world, when in fact they do not .25 Wendts
analysis offers no basis for saying when peaceful gestures should be taken
at face value, and when they should be discounted as deceptions.26 When we consider the
implications of a Hitlerite state deceiving others to achieve a position of
military superiority, we understand why great powers in history have
tended to adopt postures of prudent mistrust.
believe in. But

Neg=Western Fem
The Neg employs Western feminism that makes false
presumptions about Third World women and impedes change
Bruno 6 (PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, 06 (Javier Pereira, Third World Critiwues of
Western Feminist Theory in the Post-Development Era, University of Texas at Austin, January 2006,
http://www.ucu.edu.uy/facultades/CienciasHumanas/IPES/pdf/Laboratorio/Critiques_to_Western_Feminism_JPereira.p
df)//AS)

Encounters between Westem and non Westem feminists surrounding the

ongoing debate about the role of women in development tend to unveil
differentiated approaches and strategies, some of which deserve particular attention. The
rhetoric of Westem feminist groups as expressed in the world conferences
celebrated in the l980s and 1990s emphasize the ideas that: a) sex
inequality constitute the main problem faced by women in the Third
World, b) patriarchal power takes priority in the analysis of women status
(vis a vis other marginalizing forces), c) other analytical categories such as race, class
or position in national structures are less important than gender, d) a
sisterhood between First World and Third World groups will become an
effective tool to advance sex equality (Sen and Grown, 1987), e) women activism
and feminist mobilization is an effective tool to promote changes in the
sphere of women's rights. In relation with the last feature, Westem feminism
enthusiastically tends to conceive the advancement in women's rights as
the result of mobilization at the base and increasing pressure from below .
Among all possible factors, it is the activism of feminist movements what forces the
political system to make concessions around women's rights. In this view, Third
World women were frequently seen as lacking sufficient feminist ideology
and appeared to be too aligned to their local establishments and
subordinated to the (patriarchal) power of the State (Mazumdar, I977). Criticisms to
Westem feminist theories have come from different theoretical and geographical backgrounds. Diversity in feminist

The
multifaceted nature of feminism that has characterized both sides - the
developed and developing world- makes difficult any sort of simplification
or generalization about coincidences and differences. However, drawing upon the
theories in the US has also been paralleled by a prolific production of non Westem feminist thought.

selected work of a group of scholars we have attempted to elicit what we consider are the most significant and
compelling present criticisms to Westem feminist theory in the field of development. Thus, the rest of our paper will
introduce some of these critiques as originally discussed by their authors in the following terms: a) the altemative
constmction of women as subjects in the Third World feminist literature, as discussed in Saunders (2002), b) the
differentiated approach to the State in the strategies of Latin American feminist movement as analyzed by
Molyneux (2000), c) the limitations of Westem "change from below" paradigm, as discussed in Htun (2003) and
Charrad (2001), d) the debates around the notion of sisterhood as stated in Bergeron (2001), e) the colonialist
implications of Westem feminist as suggested by Moller Olkin (1999) and Aguilar (1995), and D the need to bring
the actor's perspective back as discussed in Long (2001) , Kandiyoti (2000) and Hoodfar (1997).

Their Western feminism acknowledges Third World women as

symptoms of gendered oppression without agency and refuses
to acknowledge the multiplicity of their oppression
Bruno 6 [Javier Pereira, Third World Critiques of Western Feminist Theory in the Post-Development Era,
University of Texas at Austin, January 2006,
http://www.ucu.edu.uy/sites/default/files/facultad/dcsp/western_feminy_theory.pdf, 7/30/15] BW

An important difference between western and third world feminism is

found in their conceptualization of women as the subject of struggles.
While western feminists make equality between men and women the
center of their struggles, third world feminism "stressed satisfaction of
basic material needs as a pressing issue in the context of disadvantageous

international economic order." (Saunders, 2002, p.6). Here, the situation of women is
perceived not only as the result of unequal gender relations, but as the
consequence of a wide range of oppressive situations that transcend
gender categories and are also related to race, class, and citizenship
cleavages. The perspective of Third World feminism can be reflected in the agenda and desires articulated by
a well know network of activists, researchers and policy makers spread across different countries referred to as

the principal
struggle of Third World women should be centered around the satisfaction
of basic needs, understood as basic rights. They believe women should
attain freedom not only from gender related inequalities, but also from
those related to race, class and national asymmetries, since these
categories are mutually intertwined in the concrete and real lives of
women. For a vast majority of women in the Third World, injustice as a result of class, race
and nationality divisions is closely related to the oppressive situations
that they experience as women. (Sen and Grown, 1987). In consequence, many Third World
women activists -such as those nucleated in DAWN- tend to reject the notion of a single and
uniform feminist movement, acknowledging the heterogeneity that derives from diverse sources of
DAWN - Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era. In the view of their members,

oppression. In their view, feminism is more widely defined as a struggle against all forms of injustice, also requiring
changes across the different fronts in order to attain advancements in women's rights. However, differences in the
ground should not opaque the battle to alter gender subordination which remains -among others- a relevant form of

This need to take in to consideration other forms of

oppression is a crucial difference when contrasting feminism across
western and non Western worlds, one that have important theoretical and
practical implications. On the one side, if woman as subject is conceptualized as the locus for many
oppression. (Sen and Grown, 1987)

oppressive situations, then the name Women in itself does not account for all sources of exploitation, becoming an

the notion
that Western feminism has promoted about a Third World Women as an
autonomous and sovereign subject (in its Foucaultian sense) seems to fail when we
acknowledge its limitations. As participants in the development process,
women are not to be seen as the revolutionary and sovereign actors
through which changes should be attained, but as "a symptom of the
overdetermined acts and resistances to multiple oppressions and
exploitative process. " (Saunders, 2002). Overall, the understanding of women as a sovereign subject
obstacle or -at least- a constrain to fight against other forms of oppression. On the other hand,

with agency -typical in Western feminism- has great potential to challenge existing inequalities and oppressions in
the realm of gender relations. However, as it happens with other centered categories such as the proletariat in
Marx, its totalizing parameters may exclude the recognition of other important sources of oppression, limiting the
possibilities for justice.

Ticker Indict
Tickners IR is essentialist and reinforces gender binaries
method will always fail
Hooper 01 (Charlotte, Professor of Gender politics and IR and lecturer at University of West England, Manly
States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics, Columbia University Press, New York. p 3)

Tickner's analysis suggests that masculinist perspectives in IR do not

apply a uniform understanding of masculinity, but rather make use of a
number of different models of man (Tickner 1992, 67). She also warned against
the essentializing tendency of separating women from men as
undifferentiated categories. However, as I shall argue in chapter 2, the suggestion
that there may be a number of masculinities operating in IR theory is
rather overshadowed by the main thrust and structure of her book, which
tends to oppose a monolithic masculinism against an equally monolithic
feminism . This is a pity because the structure thus serves to essentialize both
masculinity and feminism. Clearly not all feminisms are compatible, and
neither are all models of masculinity. For example, men cannot be both in
a state of nature (the Hobbesian, realist view), and yet have control and
domination over it (the neorealist view) at the same time. Thus the
historical eclipse of realism by neorealism in the postwar period
represents a reversal of the relationship between man and nature as
conceptualized in international-relations (IR) theory.

Tickners methodology is flawed, reliance on dichotomies,

sexual difference, and stereotypes
Keohane 98 [Robert O., Duke University, International Studies Quarterly, Beyond Dichotomy:
Conversations between International Relations and Feminist Theory, March 1998,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600824, 7/31/15], BW
Taking scholarly work seriously, however, involves not only trying to read it sympathetically, but also offering

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
problem-solving theory. Problem-solving [theory] takes the world as it
finds it and implicitly accepts the prevailing order as its framework
(1997:619). The second dichotomy pits hermeneutic, historically-based,
humanistic and philosophical traditions against positivist epistemologies
modeled on the natural sciences. Finally, Tickner contrasts an ideology
that emphasizes the social construction of reality with an atomistic,
asocial conception of behavior governed by the laws of nature (1997:616, 618-9).
criticism of arguments that do not seem convincing.

International relations theory is portrayed as problem-solving, positivist, an asocial; feminist theory as critical, postpositivist, and sociological.

A2: Patriarchy=Root Cause of War

Claiming patriarchy is the root cause reinscribes the white,
gendered subjectThis turns the critique and increases the
risk of violence against non-white men
Thobani 7 (Sunera Thobani, Womens studies at the University of British Columbia, White wars: Western
feminisms and the `War on Terror', Feminist Theory (2007) 8: 169)
In the absence of a critique of the racially exclusionary forms of feminisms (including radical feminisms) that can be
found in the US, Eisenstein returns to the familiar terrain of white feminists claiming their own experience as gender
victims to present themselves as the natural gender allies of women in the third world. Although Eisenstein does
not re-centre the white imperial subject in quite the manner of Chesler or Butler, she does not fully de-centre it
either. Rather, she allows for the feminized imperial subject to be presented as endangered by patriarchy, both of
American and Muslim men, but not Muslim women as endangered by the racism of white men and women.

there is considerable criticism of anti-racist and anti-colonial male leaders

for their sexism, as there is of anti-racist feminists for inadequate comprehension of their
oppression, but little substantive critique is to be found of the racism of white
mainstream and radical feminisms. Disappointingly, this text demonstrates that a rejection
of the East/West binary can coexist with the re-inscription of a white
gendered subject position as innocent of, and removed from, its
complicities with empire-building. Eisensteins highlighting of male violence in the US is certainly
Predictably then,

important, especially as patriarchal practices in their Western and secular garb are being removed from scrutiny

simply pointing to the

white male domination of white women does not really challenge the Western
racialized-gendered discourse that has defined non-white men as
inherently, and far more, patriarchal and violent. This discourse has now
become most virulently anti-Muslim, but it has been directed in the past against all third world
through the hypervisibility given to these practices in the Islamic context. But

peoples, most popularly through the Western cultural constructs of Black and third world machismo.

Eisenstein surprisingly ignores this historical tradition of the West as she argues
that a Global Misogyny (2004: 150) lies at the core of the current conflict, with
white women equally threatened by it.

Gender is not the root cause of war Efforts to end gender

injustice must start by dealing with war Only the aff can
provide the space necessary for change.
Goldstein 1 (Joshua S. Goldstein, Professor of International Relations at American University, War and
Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa, 2001, pp.411-412)
I began this book hoping to contribute in some way to a deeper understanding of war an understanding that
would improve the chances of someday achieving real peace, by deleting war from our human repertoire. In
following the thread of gender running through war, I found the deeper understanding I had hoped for a
multidisciplinary and multilevel engagement with the subject. Yet I became somewhat more pessimistic about how
quickly or easily war may end. The war system emerges, from the evidence in this book, as relatively ubiquitous
and robust. Efforts to change this system must overcome several dilemmas mentioned in this book. First, peace
activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working for peace. Many peace scholars and activists

if one believes that sexism

contributes to war, one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among
others) in order to pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women,
labor, minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war . The
evidence in this book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the
other way. War is not a product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any
other single cause, although all of these influence wars outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in part
fueled and sustained these and other injustices. So, if you want peace, work for peace.
Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace. Causality does not run just
upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies,
and governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in
support the approach, if you want peace, work for justice. Then,

attitudes towards war and the military may be the most important way to reverse womens oppression. The

dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy, allies, and moral grounding,
yet, in light of this books evidence,

the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of war

seems to be empirically inadequate.

War Causes Patriarchy

Gender oppression does not cause war, its the other way
around
Goldstein 1 (Joshua, Intl Rel Prof @ American U, 2001, War and Gender, p. 412)

peace activists face a dilemma in thinking about causes of war and working
for peace. Many peace scholars and activists support the approach, if you
want peace, work for justice. Then, if one believes that sexism contributes to
war one can work for gender justice specifically (perhaps among others) in order to
pursue peace. This approach brings strategic allies to the peace movement (women, labor,
minorities), but rests on the assumption that injustices cause war. The evidence in this
book suggests that causality runs at least as strongly the other way. War is not a
product of capitalism, imperialism, gender, innate aggression, or any other
single cause, although all of these influence wars outbreaks and outcomes. Rather, war has in
part fueled and sustained these and other injustices.9 So,if you want peace,
work for peace. Indeed, if you want justice (gender and others), work for peace.
First,

Causality does not run just upward through the levels of analysis, from types of individuals, societies, and
governments up to war. It runs downward too. Enloe suggests that changes in attitudes towards

war and the military may be the most important way to reverse womens
oppression. The dilemma is that peace work focused on justice brings to the peace movement energy,
allies, and moral grounding, yet, in light of this books evidence, the emphasis on injustice as the main cause of
war seems to be empirically inadequate. "men of Africa" as a group?) are seen as a group precisely
because they are generally dependent and oppressed, the analysis of specific

historical differences becomes impossible, because reality is always apparently

structured by divisionstwo mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive groups, the victims and the
oppressors. Here the sociological is substituted for the biological in order, however, to
create the samea unity of women. Thus, it is not the descriptive potential of gender difference, but
the privileged positioning and explanatory potential of gender difference as the
origin of oppression that I question. In using "women of Africa" (as an already constituted group
of oppressed peoples) as a category of analysis, Cutrufelli denies any historical specificity to the location of
women as subordinate, powerful, marginai, central, or otherwise, vis-a-vis particular social and power networks.

Women are taken as a unified "Powerless" group prior to the analysis in

question. Thus, it is then merely a matter of specifying the context after the
fact. "Women" are now placed in the context of the famiiy, or in the workplace, or within religious networks,
almost as if these systems existed outside the relations of women with other women, and women with men.

The problem with this analytic strategy is that it assumes men and women are
already constituted as sexual-political subjects prior to their entry into the
arena of social relations. Only if we subscribe to this assumption is it possible to undertake analysis
which looks at the "effects" of kinship structures, colonialism, organization of labor, etc., on women, who are
already defined as a group apparently because of shared dependencies, but ultimately because of their gender.
But women are produced through these very relations as well as being implicated in forming these relations. As
Michelle Rosaldo states: " . . . woman's place in human social life is not in any direct
sense a product of the things she does (or even less, a function of what, biologically, she is)
but the meaning her activities acquire through concrete social interactions .""

That women mother in a variety of societies is not as significant as the value

attached to mothering in these societies. The distinction between the act of mothering and the
status attached to it is a very important oneone that needs to be made and analyzed contextually.

Permutations

Do Both
Alt alone fails and a combination solves best and overcomes
the links as well as the lack of a continua. (Tickner specific)
Keohane 98 [Robert O., Duke University, International Studies Quarterly, Beyond Dichotomy:
Conversations between International Relations and Feminist Theory, March 1998,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600824, 7/31/15], BW

The problem with Tickners 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 themselves somewhere along the dimensions between critical and
problem-solving theory, nomothetic and narrative epistemology, and a social or structural conception of

the ends of these continua are the optimal

places to rest ones perspective. Criticism of the world, by itself, becomes
jeremiad, often resting implicitely on a utopian perspective of human
potential. Without analysis, furthermore, it constitutes merely the opinion
of one or a number of people. On the other side, implicit or complacent
international relations. In my opinion, none of

acceptance of the world as it is would rob the study of international

relations of much of its meaning. How could one identitfy problems
without criticism at some level? The issue is not problem-solving vs.
critical theorya convenient device for discarding work that one does not
wish to acceptbut 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

The deeper the criticism, the

more wide-ranging the questions. Narrowly problem-solving work , as in much
policy analysis, often ignores the most important causal factors in a situation
because they are not manipulable in the short run. However, the more critical and wideranging an authors 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
warfare, all warfare, all coercion, or the system of states itself?

to help to eliminate those that are regarded as pernicious but the opponent of the system of states has to imagine
the counterfactual situation of a system without states.

Perm solves - Deconstructing IR from within IR key to solve

hegemonic masculinization.
Hooper 1 (teacher of Gender politics and IR, lecturer at University of West England, 01[Charlotte, Manly
States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics Columbia University Press, New York. p227 LC)

The power of such struggles over masculine identities, as I argue, depends to

some extent on their taking part in a space that has been naturalized as a
masculine space. If the environment is no longer so clearly a masculine
one, then some of the imagery loses its gender specific connotations,
while the rest loses the power of naturalization. Cracks in the edifice of
masculinism are appearing, not only with the arrival of feminist
scholarship and a number of postpositivist fellow travelers who take
gender seriously, but also in that gender issues are beginning to be
addressed, however crudely, by more mainstream IR contributors.

The perm solves best: IR criticism is only effective when it is

combined with practical policy making
Keohane 98 (Beyond Dichotomy: Conversations Between International Relations and Feminist Theory
Robert O. Keohane, Duke University. International Studies Quarterly 42, 193-198. http://www.blackwell-

synergy.com/action/showPdf?submitPDF=Full+Text+PDF+%2889+KB%29&doi=10.1111%2F00208833.00076 LC)

The problem with Tickners 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

none of the ends

of these continua are the optimal places to rest ones 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
epistemology, and a social or structural conception of international relations. In my view,

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

The deeper the criticism, the more wide-ranging

the questions. Narrowly problem-solving work, as in much policy analysis,
often ignores the most important causal factors in a situation because
they are not manipulable in the short run. However, the more critical and
wide-ranging an authors perspective, the more difficult it is to do
comparative empirical analysis. An opponent of some types of war can
compare the causes of different wars, as a way to help to eliminate those
that are regarded as pernicious; but the opponent of the system of states
has to imagine the counterfactual situation of a system without states.
coercion, or the system of states itself?

The perm solvescombining our two epistemologies is the

best method to solve patriarchal militarism.
Hooper 99 Charlotte Hooper Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve
and extend access to Review of International Studies. asculinities, IR and the 'Gender Variable': A Cost-Benefit
Analysis for (Sympathetic) Gender. Review of International Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 475-491 {Shoell}
While, as indicated above, this is hardly a novel argument in feminist circles, it has not been readily understood or
accepted by others, beyond a few post-positivist sym pathisers. Mainstream critics of feminist approaches, who
might consider themselves open to persuasion with regard to the 'gender variable', have been baffled by both the
language and concerns of feminists, and have accused them, particularly post structuralist feminists, of failing to

Feminist discussions of the epistemological

limitations and inherent masculinism of main stream IR have on the whole
started from the premise that international relations reflects men and
'masculinity' and excludes women and 'femininity'. Their sub sequent explanations that
produce a relevant research agenda.5

one cannot merely add women and the feminine because gender constructions are relationally defined, that they
are linked to a whole series of gendered dichotomies in which masculine traits are valued and feminine ones
devalued (forming a residual 'other'); and that scientific methodologies reflect valued masculine traits rather than

But the argument that

mainstream approaches are ontologically and epistemologically
inadequate to deal with gender can also be approached from a different
angle, one which would perhaps provide another opportunity for sceptics to reconsider their dismissal of the
devalued feminine ones, appear to fall on deaf, or at least sceptical ears.

relevance of feminist claims, and to think through the possible range of consequences of acknowledging gender in

Rather than focusing on what is excluded from the discipline as

conventionally defined, one can focus on what is included: that is the
activities of men in the international arena . While it is commonplace to
argue that international relations reflects a world of men and masculinity,
it is also worth examining the possibility of a current of influence running
in the other direction. One could ask whether international relations plays any role in the shaping,
their work.

defining and legitimating of such masculinity or mascu linities? Might causality, or at least the interplay of complex
influences, run in both directions, in mutually reinforcing patterns? Might international relations discipline men as
much as men shape international relations?

Fem v. Peace Studies

Traditional peace studies are a form of academic respectability
that excludes a feminist perspective, which reinforces and
perpetuates patriarchy - incorporating fem studies key to long
term security.
Tickner 2014

(J. Ann, Dr. Tickner received her Ph.D from Brandeis University and her MA from Yale
University. She works at American University as a Distinguished Scholar in
Residence and is a Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California. A
Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Oxford University Press, pgs 3739)//JS
As is the case with security studies, peace studies and feminist studies have also
proceeded on separate tracks. Like much of the theoretical literature in security
studies, the peace studies discipline has assumed gender neutrality; in
other words, gender issues are generally thought to be irrelevant to its
theoretical assumptions and explanations. Peace studies rarely
investigate how women are differentially affected by war, structural
violence, and environmental degradation. Womens lives and the
consequences of gender inequality may even seem like distractions from
the more important issues in the field. What accounts for this silence
with respect to gender issues? One possible explanation might be the
fields efforts to maintain academic respectability. The age-old association of
women with pacifism and romanticized domestic values of caring and nurturance
suggest dangers that peace researchers face when dealing with gender issues.
Gaining respectability, or the ability to challenge realist concepts
without being dismissed as idealist, inhibits the consideration of what,
in the academic mainstream, are perceived as marginal or radical issues
(Reardon 1985, chap. 5; Murray and Mack 1985, 91202).10 However, as discussed
in Chapter 1, this stereotypical view of women as innately more peaceful
than men is troubling to many feminists as well (Burguires 1990, 16). For this
reason, certain feminists, in the 1980s, also cautioned against merging peace
studies with feminist studies (Sylvester 1987). Jean Elshtain argued that feminists
should be suspicious of definitions of peace that eschew difference and envision an
unattainable world of harmony and abiding order (Elshtain 1988). Such visions
relegate womens voices to utopian and idealistic musings, thus
permitting womens various struggles for justice and equality to be
ignored. Adrienne Harris claimed that the opposition between aggressive warmaking men and nurturing peaceful women is deeply problematic (Harris and King
1989). Such myths tend to devalue women, reinforce militarism, and consequently
delegitimate peace experiments. In reality, most feminist perspectives on peace
and security are not searching for what Jane Addams called a goody-goody peace
(Elshtain 1988); rather, they are seeking a more robust definition of peace as
freedom from all sources of oppression. Therefore, in spite of the reservations of
both feminists and peace researchers, peace studies has much to gain by
incorporating gender analysis and feminist perspectives into its subject
matter. Peace studies and feminism have much in common, both in terms
of similar normative orientations toward issues of conflict resolution and
socioeconomic justice and a shared commitment to an interdisciplinary
methodology (Burguires 1990, 15). Having moved beyond romanticized images

that link women with an idealized peace, feminist theories have the potential
for extending and even transforming our understanding of the sources of
conflict and the potential for long-term security.

Fem v. Critical Security Studies

Perm do both: Critical security studies and fem IR are more
alike than not. They stem from the same ontology and are both
emancipatory - the permutation is net beneficial because it
leads us to construct the best definitions of peace and
security.
Tickner 2014
(J. Ann, Dr. Tickner received her Ph.D from Brandeis University and her MA from Yale
University. She works at American University as a Distinguished Scholar in
Residence and is a Professor Emerita at the University of Southern California. A
Feminist Voyage Through International Relations, Oxford University Press, pgs 3637)//JS
Like feminists, critical security studies scholars have suggested that
issues they consider important for understanding security cannot be
raised within a rationalist framework that depends on an ontology based
on rational actors in a state-centric world. Their belief that state and
other actors cannot be understood without examining their identities, as
well as the identities they attribute to others, demands more interpretive
modes of analysis that can investigate how these identities, which may
lead to conflict, are constructed and maintained. Similarly, feminist
theorists investigate how oppressive gender hierarchies that, they believe,
decrease the security of individuals are constructed and maintained. More
radical versions of critical security studies claim that when knowledge
about security is constructed in terms of the binary metaphysics of
Western culturesuch as inside versus outside, us versus them, and community
versus anarchysecurity can be understood only within the confines of a
domestic community whose identity is constructed in antithesis to
external threat. Feminists have pointed to similar binaries that, they claim,
are gendered; frequently, those living on the outside of ones own states
boundaries are seen as feminized, less rational, and more unpredictable than those
on the inside. Like much of feminism, critical security studies are also
emancipatory . For example, critical security scholar Ken Booth has
defined security as freeing individuals and groups from the social,
physical, economic, and political constraints that prevent them from
carrying out what they would freely choose to do (Booth 1991).8
Perspectives on security that begin with the security of the individual
provide an entry point for feminist theorizing. Claiming, as they do, that
gender hierarchies are socially constructed allows feminists, like critical
security scholars, to pursue an emancipatory agenda and to postulate a
world that could be otherwise. For example, Joshua Goldstein concludes
his study by suggesting that the socialization practices of boys and girls
motivates mens participation in combat and womens exclusion from it
(Goldstein 2001). And practices can be changed. Feminist IR scholar Charlotte
Hooper (1998) sees in the West some softening of what she terms hegemonic
masculinity, as we move away from warrior heroes to a masculinity linked to
processes of globalization and capitalist restructuring, a shift that has been

somewhat compromised by the post9/11 security agenda.9 The 1990s emphasis

on the caring, humanitarian side of military duties, found in certain peacekeeping
operations, and the increasing visibility of women and gay men in US and European
militaries lend support to the idea that the military may be becoming detached from
hegemonic masculinity. Recent research has also suggested that those who
oppose military solutions to conflictwomen and menare among those
most likely to support feminist goals. Mark Tessler and Ina Warriners
article in World Politics, which described a study of Israeli, Egyptian, Palestinian,
and Kuwaiti attitudes toward the Arab/Israeli conflict, reported that men and
women in these societies did not have significantly different attitudes
toward the conflict, and there was no evidence of women being less
militaristic than men. There was a strong positive correlation, however,
between those who supported equality of women and those who
supported diplomacy and compromise (Tessler and Warriner 1997). If women
become warriors, it reinforces the war system. If women are seen only as
peacemakers, it reinforces both militarized masculinity and womens
marginality with respect to the national security functions of the state.
Since the way we construct knowledge cannot be separated from the way
we act in the world, perhaps these feminist attempts to move beyond
gendered dichotomies that support militarism and war can help us all to
construct more robust definitions of peace and security . With this goal in
mind, I shall now turn to an analysis of some feminist contributions to peace
studies.

Perm Solvency
Feminist objectives can be achieved successfully through state
action
Lovenduski 5 (Joni, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck college, University of London, author of
Women and European Politics and Feminizing politics; Cambridge university press)

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century there has been a proliferation of
state agencies established to promost womens rights, often called women's policy
agencies. WPAs are sometimes termed state feminist. State feminism is a contested term. To some it is an
oxymoron. It has been variously defined as the activities of feminists or femocrats in government and
administration (Hemes 1987; Sawer 1990), institutionalised feminism in public agencies (Eisenstein 1990;
Outshoom 1994), and the capacity of the state to contribute to the fulfilment of a feminist agenda (Sawer 1990;
Stetson 1987). In this book we define state feminism as the advocacy of women's
movement demands inside the state. The establishment of WPAs changed the

setting in which the women's movement and other feminists could advance
their aims, as they offered, in principle, the possibility to influence the agenda
and to further feminist goals through public policies from inside the state apparatus. WPAs could
increase women's access to the state by furthering women's participation in political decision-making, and by
inserting feminist goals into public policy. Thus WPAs may enhance the political representation of women. WPAs
vary considerably in their capacity, resources and effectiveness, raising questions about the circumstances
under which they are most likely to enhance women's political representation. To understand them we

need to consider in detail the part they play in processes of incorporating

women's interests (substantive representation) into policy-making, a requirement that
is particularly important when the decisions are about political representation
itself.

Perm solves the power of the state needs to work in

conjunction with power hierarchies, to be understood in the
proper context
Schwartzman 99 (Lisa, Philosophy @ U of NY Stony Brook, Hypatia 14(2), p. 33)IM

there are lawsboth criminal and civilpreventing

harms perpetrated by either the government or by individuals , protection already exists
In response to this, a liberal might argue that because

against the systemic harms of racism, [End Page 33] sexism, classism, etc. Whether an individual, group, or government
commits these sorts of harms, laws already exist to address them. Focusing on civil law, and on constitutional law in particular,
MacKinnon does not deny that the law provides a formal guarantee to respect and protect the rights of individuals to be treated

the way that liberal theorists interpret and employ these rights
often renders them ineffective in bringing justice to people whose oppression is constituted through the
"equally." Nonetheless,

operation of racial, sexual, and economic power structures. Without addressing and altering these power structures, MacKinnon
argues, the formal granting of the rights to free speech, privacy, freedom, and equality are not going to succeed in bringing
about justice and equality for women, or for other members of oppressed groups. 11 Although recent laws that recognize sexual
harassment as a problem of sex equality are one exception to this, for the most part the law does not acknowledge explicitly the

the rights of women and members of other

oppressed groups are recognized to the extent that the persons in these
positions resemble white, upper-middle-class men. Note that MacKinnon is not
suggesting that these structures of power are wholly independent of the state
or that they will not change unless structures outside the realm of the state change first. MacKinnon sees the
power of the state working in conjunction with these specific hierarchiesin
both overt and covert ways. Thus, rather than interpreting these liberal rights and
freedoms as simply rights against government intervention, MacKinnon argues that they must be understood
in the context of inequality and oppression; they must be interpreted in such a
way that they can begin to change these structures of oppression and thereby make it
oppression of women and attempt to remedy it. Rather,

possible for people to exercise the formal rights that the Constitution legally grants them.

Pure rejection of the states provision of rights fails working

within the state is key
Schwartzman 99 (Lisa, Philosophy @ U of NY Stony Brook, Hypatia 14(2), p. 42)IM

Clearly, it would be easy to interpret MacKinnon's objections to liberal rights theory as a simple rejection of
certain rightslike the right to privacy or the right to free speechif not all rights in general. Dworkin seems to
interpret MacKinnon in this way when, in his review of Only Words, he writes: "She [ MacKinnon] and her

followers regard freedom of speech and thought as an elitist, inegalitarian

ideal that has been of almost no value to women , blacks, and others without power; they
say America would be better off if it demoted that ideal as many other nations have" (Dworkin 1993, 42).
Elsewhere in this same article, Dworkin suggests that MacKinnon sees "equality" and "liberty" as opposed to one
another, that she sees them as "competing constitutional value[s]" (1993, 36). On the one hand, Dworkin might
be right: MacKinnon [End Page 42] seems to dismiss many of the rights that are currently discussed in liberal
political debates. She offers numerous arguments about the way that these rights function to uphold the status
quo, to obscure relations of power, and to prevent equality from being achieved. What I have suggested,
however, is that this does not mean that she is rejecting "rights" per se, nor does it

mean that one who endorses her criticisms of liberal rights theory must reject
all use of rights. Although she writes harshly about rights, MacKinnon must be understood
as criticizing the way that these rights have been formulated and even the way that
they currently functionoutside of a critical analysis of society's structures of power
and outside of questions of equality. It is only by asking these sorts of questions and by analyzing
the social relations of power (in ways that go well beyond the simplistic individual/government dichotomy) that
one could come up with a new conception of rights that would not suffer from the problems of liberalism. The
criticisms of liberal rights theory that I have culled from MacKinnon's work do point to the need for an
alternative theory of rights. Although I have not explained what a new conception of rights might
look like, I have suggested that it would specify concretely the needs and interests of
groups of oppressed people. Because liberals define rights abstractly (and because they tend to
focus on individual, negative rights), they often take for granted social relations of power. As a result, the rights
of people of color, women, working-class people, and other members of oppressed groups tend to be
overlooked. The allegedly abstract way that liberal theory formulates and describes the rights to which
individuals are said to be entitled often conceals the more concrete content that these rights have come to have
in our society. In this way, the rights that upper-middle-class white men value and already enjoy are protected
under the guise of treating individual preferences neutrally and protecting abstract rights. To change a

system in which certain groups of people already have powers and freedoms
that areat least in practiceunavailable to others, an alternative theory of rights
would have to include an analysis of who has power over whom, and it would
have to concern itself with attempting to remedy these inequalities through
changing society's institutions, practices, and structures of power, not a
rejection of the institutions of society, or the provision of rights from the
government and Rule of Law.

Using the law to recognize womens rights is key to solve

Fellmeth 2k (Aaron, Int. Rel. @ Yale, Human Rights Quarterly 22(3), p. 658-733)IM
the causes of gender bias in international law are linked
to the economic and political disempowerment of women within states ,
As discussed above,

and to the dominance of financial profit over human rights in the international agenda.

International law has slowly improved in recognizing women's human

rights and is adopting an "ethic of care" to balance the traditional "ethic of justice," but the
commitment of states to human rights concerns has not progressed adequately. Many of the poor
countries of the world are getting poorer, and, in the vast majority of these less industrialized
countries, the social, economic, and political situation of women has not significantly improved relative
to men since the end of the Second World War. While attention to women's interests has increased
greatly in industrialized states (and continues to improve), rape, the domestic assault of women, and
political and economic inequality remain severe problems. 314 Wealthier states should

establish a fund and offer technical assistance to less wealthy states to

ensure compliance with human rights norms, particularly with respect to
women. On the diplomatic level, the richer and more powerful states focus more
on international economic matters primarily benefiting men than on
pressuring other states--particularly dictatorships--to respect women's rights and
other human rights and protect their citizens from gender-based discrimination. The fall of communism
seems to have shifted this focus slightly, but there has been no momentous change, despite the fact
that the democratic states no longer perceive a need to fund less economically developed states-regardless of their human rights records--to prevent them from falling under the sway of the Soviet
Union. The solution to gender bias in international law is , therefore, not only

to increase the representation of women in international organizations,

but to augment their political and economic representation in the states
that compose international society. As long as women are underrepresented in Nepalese
politics and business, women's rights will be underenforced in Nepal. Certainly, any reform
within states will be helpful. But on the international level, states should establish
institutions focusing on compliance with human rights norms and women's rights particularly. States'
tools [End Page 731] for encouraging women's representation in other states are largely limited to
diplomacy and leading by example, and to drafting and adhering to their own treaties codifying the
rights of women under international law. However, these treaties must be binding under

international law, should disallow derogations, and should require states

to take concrete steps toward implementing them .

1AR Perm
Their rejection of the permutation re-entrenches the
hierarchies they seek to overturn
Caprioli 4 (Mary Caprioli, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tennessee,
International Studies Review, June 2004, p.256)

There is little utility in constructing a divide if none exists. As Thomas

Kuhn (1962) argues, common measures do exist across paradigms that provide a shared basis for theory. It

"Myth of Framework," which postulates

that "we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories, our
expectations, our past experiences, our language, and that as a
consequence, we cannot communicate with or judge those working
in terms of a different paradigm" (Neufeld 1995:44). Some feminists (for example,
Tickner 1996, 2001; Peterson 2002; Steans 2003) appear to embrace this "Myth of
Framework" by accentuating the differences between the
perspectives of feminist and IR theorists based on their past experiences and
seems overly pessimistic to accept Karl Popper's

languages and criticize IR theorists for their lack of communication with feminist IR scholars. Ironically, the
"Myth of Framework" shares a number of assumptions with Hobbes's description of the state of nature that

The "Myth of Framework" assumes no middle

groundscholars are presumably entrenched in their own
worldviews without hope of compromise or the ability to understand
others' worldviews. If this is the case, scholars are doomed to
discussions with like-minded individuals rather than having a
productive dialogue with those outside their own worldview.
Scholars who accept the "Myth of Framework" have essentially
created a Tower of Babel in which they choose not to understand
each other's language. The acceptance of such a myth creates
conflict and establishes a hierarchy within international relations
scholarship even though conventional feminists theoretically seek to
identify and eradicate conflict and hierarchy within society as a
whole.
feminists routinely reject.