International Studies Review (2006) 8, 383395

REFLECTION, EVALUATION, INTEGRATION

On The Frontlines or Sidelines of

Knowledge and Power? Feminist Practices
of Responsible Scholarship1
J. ANN TICKNER
School of International Relations, University of Southern California

This presidential address challenges IR scholars to reflect on their scholarly

responsibility in what some have termed a new age of empire and in which
critics of US foreign policyFacademics and otherwiseFare increasingly
under attack. Using the metaphor of frontlines and sidelines, the question
is raised as to whether we can or should engage directly in the policy world
or remain at a critical distance from it. This essay focuses on some ways in
which feminist scholarship is responding to these questions and challenges.
Claiming that knowledge and practice cannot be separated, feminists argue
that the foundations of modern knowledge, built during an earlier age of
empire, are implicated, often unconsciously, in the ways in which scholars
and policymakers construct and respond to global events today. The div-
isive gendered dimensions of the clash of civilizations and the gendered
workings of the global economy and the way we analyze it are presented to
illustrate this claim. The essay presents some feminist reformulations that
could contribute to more inclusionary theory and practice.

Were an empire now and when we act we create our own reality.
Senior Adviser to President George W. Bush (Susskind 2004:44).

Definitions belong to the definersFnot the defined

Toni Morrison (quoted in Eisenstein 2004:188).

The role of the intellectual is to say truth to power, to address the central
authority in every society without hypocrisy, and to choose the method, the style, the
critique best suited for these purposes. This is so because the intellectual produces
a kind of performance that continues for years, whose main goal is to give
utterance not to mere fashion and passing fads but to real ideas and values
Edward Said (1996:184185).

My choice of the theme, Politics, Policy, and Responsible Scholarship, for the
2007 annual meeting of the International Studies Association was motivated by the
profound unease many scholars of international relations feel about the direction of

1
Presidential address presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, CA,
March 23, 2006. The author thanks Hayward Alker and Sandra Harding for their helpful comments and sug-
gestions. Thanks are also due to Angela McCracken for her valuable research assistance.

r 2006 International Studies Review.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
384 On The Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge and Power?

current US foreign policy. The term empire is now being used with approbation
by neoconservatives in the Bush Administration and with alarm by critics. Empire
has spawned a new wave of scholarship that, according to Ronald Steel (2004:30),
marks an early stage of imperial self-recognitionFan unfolding process that, he
believes, began not with the Bush Administration but in 1945 when the United
States emerged from World War II with enormous power and self-confidence.
Indeed, Steel (2004) claims that there is widespread acceptance of the idea that the
United States is an empire, defined not in terms of formal acquisition of territory, as
was the case with the earlier European empires, but in terms of economic and
political control (see also Hardt and Negri 2000; Harvey 2003; Ikenberry 2004). He
traces this imperial legacy back to the early days of US history and argues that it
became global after 1945.
Nevertheless, the last 5 years mark a new stage in US global reach. Following the
events of September 11, 2001, the United States has been engaged in a global war
against evil that has demanded a full-spectrum global response to any imminent
threat. This strategy, articulated in the National Security Strategy of 2002 (Bush 2002),
was backed by military budget outlays of $465.9 billion in 2005 (International Institute
for Strategic Studies 2005), with an additional $346 billion in special supplementary
funding appropriations having been targeted for the war on terrorism between 2001
and 2006 (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2005).2 Besides its mili-
tary component, the 2002 National Security Strategy called for the promotion of a
neoliberal global economy and the globalization of Western-style democracy.3 A na-
tion that possesses this kind of military powerFin fact, has a defense budget ex-
ceeding that of all other countries combinedFas well as is the worlds dominant
economy can be considered, by any reckoning, an imperial state (Steel 2004:29).
As many of us in the academy look from the sidelines at this new age of empire
(with which many of us feel a profound discomfort), we are also witnessing an
erosion of academic freedom and a silencing of dissent on critical policy issues. For
some time, efforts to teach our students the validity of others worldviews have been
subject to the criticism of multiculturalism voiced by neoconservatives who have
labeled teaching about women, minorities, and non-Western cultures as relativist,
nonfactual, and politically charged. Consider, for example, Lynne Cheneys (1995)
Telling the Truth in which she weighs in against multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, and
feminism, accusing them of a dangerous relativism that leads us to stray from the
pursuit of truth in education. She holds these dangerous politicized forms of know-
ledge accountable for everything from grade inflation to flawed tenure decisions.
Such criticisms intensified in the wake of the September 11 attacks; in a
September 22 article in the New York Times, Edward Rothstein (2001) articulated the
hope that the attacks might challenge the ethically perverse intellectual perspec-
tives of postmodernism and postcolonialism, which, with their extreme form of
cultural relativism and rejection of objectivity and universalism, have contributed,
he claims, to undermining the political and military authority of the United States.
In a stinging indictment of the US academy, William Bennett (2002:5657),
the United States Secretary of Education from 1985 to 1988, blamed the lack of
preparedness for September 11 not on institutions of government or on physical

2
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2005) has broken down the supplementary spending on
the war on terrorism by year: in fiscal year 2001, it was $20 billion; in 2002, $44 billion; in 2003, $88 billion; in 2004,
$87 billion; and in 2005, $107 billion.
3
In a recent article in the New York Times, neoconservative, Francis Fukuyama (2006) writes that the second Bush
Administration has been distancing itself from the policies articulated in its 2002 Strategy and is in the process of
rewriting it. He terms the neoconservative foreign policy, described in the Strategy, as benevolent hegemony but
admits that neoconservatism has become associated with coercive regime change, unilateralism, and US hegemony
and, therefore, is unacceptable to and unpopular in much of the rest of the world. He claims that he himself can no
longer support neoconservatism. Since Fukuyamas article appeared, the new National Security Strategy has been
released (Bush 2006). Its military component remains largely unchanged.
 J. ANN TICKNER 385

unpreparedness but on what he called an easy-going relativism and tolerant mul-

ticulturalism that has pervaded our universities and sapped our intellectual and
moral energy. Bennett (2002:22) describes this as a kind of unilateral disarmament,
as a result of which we have been caught with our intellectual and moral defenses
down. In a recently published book, David Horowitz (2006) has compiled a list of
the 101 most dangerous professors, seven of whom are current or past members of
the International Studies Association.4
The title of this address, On the Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge
and Power? is intended to provoke each one of us to think about how to
respond to these disturbing neo-imperial trends as well as the shrinking space for
dissent and the increasing intolerance of other worldviews that appear to go along
with them. Whatever sites we scholars of international relations occupy with respect
to the diffusion of knowledge and exercise of power, we must all ask ourselves what
we see as our role as responsible scholars, policy advisers, activists, and educators in
these difficult times. With some notable exceptions, many frontline scholars in the
United States, accustomed to the exercise of power in the policy world, find them-
selves sidelined by an apparent disregard for expert knowledge and a refusal to
listen to dissenting opinions (Featherman and Vinovskis 2001:5165; Anderson
2003; Brand 2004). Although this practice seems to have increased under the Bush
Administration, the erosion of the influence of the academic social sciences dates
back to the rise of conservatism in the 1980s, which was accompanied by the rapid
proliferation of generously funded conservative Washington-based think tanks.
Suspicious of the liberal orientation of university scholars, these conservative think
tanks have relied less on in-depth scholarly research and more on disseminating
policy positions to sympathetic legislators (Featherman and Vinovskis 2001:66).5
Questions as to the proper relationship of international relations scholars to the
policy world go back to the founding of the discipline at the beginning of the twentieth
century. In the United States, it has been a topic of considerable debate since the
influential heyday of the 1950s and 1960s when international relations scholars moved
freely in and out of the frontlines of Washington policy circles, offering their expertise
on matters ranging from nuclear strategy to development and counterinsurgency. In a
barely veiled reference to his Harvard colleagues, most notably Henry Kissinger,
Stanley Hoffmann (1981:2728), a principled policy world sideliner, warned against
the adviser who whispers in the princes ear the principles that will justify the princes
acts.6 Hans Morgenthau (1993:5), an academic frontliner, viewed the ideal role of the
scholar as looking over the shoulder of the statesman as a disinterested observer and,
in turn, being able to understand the policymakers thoughts better than he himself
did. But Morgenthau understood that disinterested knowledge was not possible. He
strove to construct a rational theory of international politicsFto create knowledge in
the service of power, in his case the power of the United States, his refuge from the
irrationalities of fascist Europe.7 The goal of this knowledge was to achieve the best
possible foreign policy within the limitations of a realist worldFto build what Robert
Cox (1981:129130) has termed problem-solving theory, that is, theory, which,

4
This right-wing assault on intellectuals is particularly focused on Middle East scholars who are accused of radical
politics and postmodern theorizing. The assault has been led by Daniel Pipes, who has targeted academic Middle
East Studies through the website Campus Watch. Over Congressional opposition, President Bush installed Pipes as a
member of the board of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) by means of a recess appointment (Lockman
2004). The Horowitz list includes four past-presidents of the Middle East Studies Association.
5
Lisa Anderson (2003:3) has claimed that, as university-based social science has become less respected in Wash-
ington, it has retreated into disciplinary chauvinism and jealous territoriality.
6
Irene Gendzier (1985) has investigated the close association political development theorists had with the US
foreign policymaking community in the 1950s and 1960s and their particularly close relationships with policy
planners in southeast Asia in the 1960s.
7
It is notable that many contemporary realists are outspoken critics of contemporary US foreign policy, par-
ticularly of the war in Iraq (see, for example, Mearsheimer and Walt 2003; Gilpin 2005).
386 On The Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge and Power?

even though it is reformist, accepts the prevailing power relationships and insti-
tutions into which they are organized as its framework for action.
Problem-solving theory in the Coxian sense has dominated international rela-
tions scholarship in the United States. Morgenthau, Kissinger, and Hoffmann
would all fit this definition; all were (and still are in the case of Hoffmann) on the
frontlines of US academic international relations, and all were deeply involved in
the practice of, or critical reflection on, the foreign policy of their adopted country.
Yet, like so many postwar realists, each was an exile from his own land. For the rest
of this address, I will leave the hallowed halls of power, academic or otherwise, that
these scholars have occupied and pursue the metaphor of intellectual as exile in a
rather different sense. Claiming that there is no such thing as disinterested object-
ivity, a position with which Morgenthau would probably agree, Edward Said (1994),
a prominent target of the conservative criticisms that I described earlier, saw the
intellectual as an exile in his or her own society, as one who raises embarrassing
questions, is unsettled, unsettles others, and stands on the side of the weak and
unrepresented. Although the early US realists were reacting against the restrictions
of totalitarian Europe, Said warned about less overt threats that exist in societies
that reward intellectual conformity, a warning that seems apt in our present times.
Although acknowledging the important contributions of international relations
scholars who are pursuing knowledge that can be incrementally reformist in the
Coxian sense both within the academy and the policy world, I want to turn my focus
to those who are challenging intellectual conformity, often at considerable profes-
sional risk. These are scholars whom Cox (1981:129130) defines as critical.
Claiming that theory is never neutral, critical theorists do not take existing power
relationships as given but call them into question. Motivated by transforming the
system rather than reforming it, they occupy more radical frontlines. By way of
illustrating the concerns of those on these new frontlines, I shall draw on some
feminist international relations scholarship, an approach still on the sidelines of the
discipline. Seldom advisers to princes, international relations feminists are pushing
and redefining the boundaries of knowledge in new ways. As scholars and activists,
they are defending the importance of listening to new voices against the backlash
generated by critics of multiculturalism such as those mentioned earlier.

Contemporary Feminist Scholarship

Contemporary feminism, which established itself in the academy in the early 1980s,
emerged out of earlier alliances of feminists in the natural and social sciences and
the humanities with activists in the womens movements, there being considerable
overlap between these academic and activist communities. Feminist scholars were
heavily influenced by the 1960s concern with giving voice to the oppressed and
disadvantaged and making coalitions with civil rights, health, and environmental
activists. Feminists remained morally engaged at a time when, under the conser-
vative attacks of the 1970s and 1980s, many social scientists were retreating from
public life into more narrowly defined disciplines. Unlike the social sciences, which
were born in the service of the modern state and whose goal was producing re-
search that could be of use to policymakers, academic feminism came out of the
womens movement of the early 1970s that had as its aim mobilizing the political
commitment necessary to end womens subordination and engaging in scholarship
dedicated toward reaching this goal (Boxer 1998:14).
Committed to interdisciplinary scholarship, many feminists see themselves as
scholar-activists, and much of feminist scholarship is avowedly political. With deep
connections to the womens movement, such scholarship has critically explored and
sought to understand the unequal gender hierarchies that exist in all societies and their
effects on the subordination of women and other marginalized groups with the goal of
changing them. Feminists in all disciplines have been acutely aware of the relationship
 J. ANN TICKNER 387

between knowledge and power and the ways that traditional knowledge has been
constructed in the interests of the powerful. Feminist scholarship has emerged from a
deep skepticism about knowledge that, even though it claims to be universal and
objective, is not. In reality, such knowledge is usually partial, created by men, and
based on mens lives. Sensitive to gendered differences in these regards, feminists see
their scholarly responsibility as creating new knowledge that is less androcentric, more
genuinely universal, and that produces research that is useful to women.
Yet, as Said acknowledged, the intellectual, however skeptical, always enters
already existing structures of power and speaks within the framework and history
of already articulated values and ideas. In the words of Toni Morrison with which
this address began, definitions belong to the definersFnot the defined (Eisen-
stein 2004:188). A similar concern was voiced by Virginia Woolf (1977), who
claimed that womens ability to write was constrained by the need to conform to the
masculine views, definitions, and values of societyFby what she metaphorically
called a womans lack of a room of her own. Woolf was writing in the 1920s, but her
sense of exile from male-dominated knowledge structures is still a concern for
contemporary academic feminists for whom a reflexive understanding of modern
knowledge construction is an important aspect of redressing the androcentric
biases of our knowledge traditions. I shall now offer some reflections on these
biases, which feminists link to the earlier imperialist era in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and are associated with European expansion.
Analyzing the foundations of modern scientific knowledge construction, feminist
philosopher Sandra Harding (1987:6) claims that traditional social science has
typically asked questions about nature and social life that certain (usually privil-
eged) men want answered. She traces the relationship between the development of
modern Western science and the history of European expansion. Challenging the
claim to value-neutrality that modern science makes with respect to the questions it
asks, she argues that the European voyages of discovery went hand in hand with the
development of modern science and technology; Europeans who were colonizing
the world needed to know about winds, tides, maps, and navigation as well as
botany, the construction of ships, firearms, and survival in harsh environments.
Such questions became intellectually interesting in order to solve colonialisms
everyday problems (Harding 1998:3954).
John Willinsky (1998:27) has also linked the way we have constructed modern
knowledge to European imperialism. He claims that five centuries of learning,
although generally helping humankind, has divided it in ways that give certain
people and places agency and authorship while denying them to others. The Car-
tesian revolution of the seventeenth century shifted knowledge based on resem-
blances to knowledge based on differenceFsuch as the differences between mind
and body, men and women, West and East, and colonizers and colonized. This is the
knowledge base that is at the root of gendered and racial structures of inequality
(see also Keller 1985; Toulmin 1990). It was men who went to the colonies to collect
and name specimens from the animal, plant, and even the human world and who
brought them back to the West to display in museums or study in laboratories.8
Cataloguing, analyzing, and putting the world on display were acts of power. This
collecting and renaming, which resulted in forgetting how much knowledge actu-
ally originated outside the West, was, for the most part, done by men.9 Few women

8
A particularly egregious example of human display was Saartjie Baartman, a 16-year-old Xhosa girl from South Africa,
who was brought to London in 1810 and put on display as the Hottentot Venus. Thought to identify a primitive level of
sexuality, she fed into the nineteenth-century European fascination with African female sexuality (Willinsky 1998:59).
9
Mary Kingsley was one of the few female travelers of the late nineteenth century to go to what were deemed the
wild parts of the earth not considered fit for Western women. She wrote that the last words a distinguished scientist
said to her before embarking on her travels in West Africa were always take measurements, Miss Kingsley, and
always take them from the adult male (quoted in Willinsky 1998:35).
388 On The Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge and Power?

went to the colonies, and women were excluded from the design and management
of the three major corporate sponsors of imperial knowledge: the Jesuits, the
trading companies, and the imperial governments themselves. Like science and
history, geography, particularly mapmaking, was also an important aspect of im-
perial knowledge. Geography played a large role in dividing the world in ways that
objectified those who are not white and who reside outside the West (Willinsky
1998:137140; see also Hodgson 1993; Johnston, Taylor, and Watts 2002), a div-
ision that is still evident in US foreign policy and the way in which knowledge is
constructed today. (For a revisionist history on the origins of ideas and technology
outside the West, see John Hobson 2004.)
Cartesian divisions between subjects and objects, observers and observed, the
West and the rest, men and women, white and non-white that were used in the
construction of Eurocentric imperial knowledge are still with us today, albeit in
more muted form. In this new age of empire, the civilizational clashes and the
struggles between good and evil that are driving our foreign policy are obvious
political manifestations of these divisions of the world. Although most of us in the
academy decry such oversimplified Manichean divisions, all of us must ask our-
selves how the deeper epistemological divisions that I have described affect our
scholarship and teachingFoften in ways that are unconscious. Given that, as men-
tioned earlier, women have rarely been the constructers or the subjects of know-
ledge, feminists studying international relations have had cause to reflect on the
gendered implications of these divisions. Their scholarship has frequently been
motivated by linguistic and empirical efforts to deconstruct these divisions and to
look beyond themFat those on the sidelines of international relations where
women and gender are hauntingly present. Like Said, such feminists see their task
as raising embarrassing questionsFincluding questions about those on the under-
side of empire whose lives have not been part of the subject matter of the discipline
but who have been deeply affected by global politics and whose presence has been
constitutive of imperial projects and scholarship. Answers to these embarrassing
questions have, I believe, yielded some important new insights into how we might
envision an international politics that does not divide the world.
I shall now present two examples of how feminists are deconstructing and trying to
get beyond these divisions. The first will focus on civilizational divisions that inhere in
the war on terror and the background knowledge that such divisions presuppose.
The second will focus more directly on knowledge building itselfFexamining how
we construct our analyses of liberal international political economy.

Gendered Dimensions of Civilizational Divisions

Feminist scholars in international relations draw our attention to how the resurgent
dividing discourse of a clash of civilizations has been framed in gendered and
racialized terms that, they believe, reinforces mutual hostilities and delegitimizes
less conflictual alternatives (Tickner 2002; Agathangelou and Ling 2004). In the
United States, the attacks of September 11 reinforced the legitimacy of a militarized
national security strategy. The 2004 presidential election, in which each candidates
primary goal was to prove his toughness and ability to provide the kind of lead-
ership necessary to fight the global war on terror, demonstrated a kind of mili-
tarized masculinity that has been back in vogue in the United States since
September 11.10 Those we fear today are angry young men wielding rifles and

10
Robert Dean (1998), analyzing the John F. Kennedy presidency of the 1960s, argues that this also was an era
marked by the re-emergence of warrior masculinity. Such a response was deemed a necessary reaction to the 1950s,
a time when, according to Kennedy and his advisors, the United States had become soft and consumerist. Kennedy
claimed that the perceived missile gap in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, as well as the increasing
insurgency in Southeast Asia, called for a toughening of US foreign policy.
 J. ANN TICKNER 389

shouting death to America. But, confounding our divisions, these men are not
just over there but in here. Arab and Muslim men have been subject to gender
and racial profiling and detention under the US Patriot Act of 2001, based on the
excuse that we are at war. Gender symbolism is evident on both sides of this war;
it also abounds in the hatred of the West expressed by followers of Al Qaeda and
other extremist groups, a hatred that is frequently expressed in misogynist terms.
This is confirmed by Jessica Sterns (2003) examination of the worldviews of those
who commit violence in the name of religion, which reveals a strong hatred of
women across all religious groups.
Feminists claim that the use of gender symbolism, implicit in gender and racial
profiling, has important implications. By gender symbolism is meant the character-
istics such as power, strength, protection, rationality, and warrior that are typically
associated with masculinity. Their opposites such as weakness, protected, emotion-
ality, and passivity are associated with femininity. Both women and men place a
higher value on masculine characteristicsFat least in the public sphere and certainly
with respect to international politics and security. A muscular type of strong mas-
culinity, certainly not characteristic of all men, is a powerful legitimator of war and
national security. At times of uncertainty and crisis, we look to male heroes to protect
us, and we feel safer when our men are protecting us against other dangerous
(often non-white) men. Military service is frequently used as a criterion for any public
officials fitness for power (Enloe 2004:153); it creates a division between those to
whom we grant authority to speak on military and security matters and those
to whom we do not. Because he was a decorated military veteran, US Congressman
John P. Murthas call for withdrawal from Iraq, even though dismissed by both
political parties, was accorded a degree of respect not granted to peace activists such
as Cindy Sheenan and Quaker hostage Tom Fox.11 Patriotism is frequently associated
with military service, and the role of the President as Commander-in-Chief has been
an inhibiting force for potential female presidential candidates in the United States.
But the gendered implications of divides between protectors and protected extend
beyond their negative effects on women. They also delegitimate efforts to understand
others worldviews and prevent us from seeing policy options that might be less
conflictual. Efforts to appear tough produce foreign policies more consistent with
an imperial role than with hegemonic consensus-building. They severely limit the
US capacity to play a useful role in creating a more genuinely secure international
community (Enloe 2004:126).
And what if we look beyondFto the other side of this divide? Just as we see
dangerous men, we also see helpless women. During the immediate aftermath of
September 11, media representations of the shadowy presence of helpless burqa-
clad women were set off against the militarized masculinity of the United States
new war on terror. These dual images portrayed a sharp divide between Western
enlightened democracy, in which women are afforded their human rights, and the
rest of the world, where they are not. Undeniably, women in Afghanistan were
subject to severe restrictions and deprivations under the Taliban, which sought to
erase them from public life in the name of cleansing Afghan society. Women were
banned from employment, from education, and from going into public places un-
less accompanied by a close male relative. As is often the case, restrictions on women
were imposed in the name of defending the cultural purity of the nation

11
Congressman Murtha (Democrat-Pennsylvania) made headlines when he called for an accelerated withdrawal
of US troops from Iraq at a news conference on Capitol Hill on November 18, 2005 (Schmitt with Sanger and
Stolberg 2005). Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a serviceman who was killed in Iraq, made headlines when she was
arrested for wearing an antiwar shirt to President Bushs State of the Union Address on February 1, 2006 (Stolberg
and Kornblut 2006). Tom Fox worked in Iraq as a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, an organization that
promotes peace and human rights in conflict zones. He, together with three of his colleagues, was kidnapped on
November 26, 2005 and later murdered (Semple 2006). Using Fox as an example of a peacemaker supports my
general claim that gender is a social construction. Many men are peacemakers and some women are warriors.
390 On The Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge and Power?

(Hans 2004:245). Since the overthrow of the Taliban, conditions have not changed
for a majority of women living in rural areas of Afghanistan. In addition to con-
tinued cultural restrictions and the decrease of security, the war has left many
women in extreme poverty and often as the sole providers for their families.
Nevertheless, the portrayal of Afghan women and Third World women more
generally as helpless victims who lack agency is a further illustration of the way in
which we divide our neo-imperial world; it raises a number of important issues
about how we objectify those on the other side. Less well acknowledged in the
WestFby the academic community as well as by the policy worldFare the human
rights struggles in which women themselves have been engaged worldwide. If we
look beyond the hierarchical boundaries of separation between the West and the
rest, we see that most of the advances made in womens human rights have been
made by women themselves working on different frontlines: in local contexts and in
transnational social movements. These struggles have resulted in the passage of
various conventions that have changed the meaning of human rights to include
violence against women and issues associated with gendered structural violence.
For example, one of the earliest attempts at emancipation and social reform for
women took place in Afghanistan at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of
the twentieth centuries (Hans 2004:234235). The Revolutionary Association of
Women in Afghanistan (RAWA) has fought for human rights and social justice for
women since its founding in 1977. Continuing to work underground in Afghanistan
after the advent of the Taliban and in the refugee camps of Pakistan, RAWA
brought education and health care to women and mobilized them in defense of
their rights. During the Taliban era, burqa-clad women went into Afghanistan from
Pakistan on dangerous missions with secret cameras to document abuse.
Like many womens advocacy groups, RAWA is militantly secularist, seeing
religion as bad for women. Indeed, most feminists believe that all conservative
religions, including Christianity and Islam, are bad for women. Conservative
religious movements and conservative movements more generally that profess to
be returning to cultural authenticity do so by enforcing strict codes of behavior
on women. Religious leaders, almost all of whom are men, use religious texts
selectively to enforce their own interests, which they represent as Gods will.
Interpretations of the Quran, the Bible, and other religious texts have long been
monopolized by male scholars.
Recently, both Christian and Islamic feminist theologians have begun to chal-
lenge this monopoly. Feminists in both the Islamic and Christian traditions are
trying to develop a theology that does not rely on selective readings of texts that
claim authority and certitude of a tradition that is hierarchically ordered and
repressive. Raffat Hassan (1999:260) claims that there are no Quranic statements
that justify the rigid restrictions that have been imposed on women in the name of
Islam. Islamic feminists believe that Islam can be progressive for women; it was
radically egalitarian for its time and remains so in some of its scriptures (Coleman
2006:26). Surely we have a responsibility to listen to Muslim women who have been
articulating a more enlightened view of Islam and also to Western feminists who are
challenging the erosion of womens rights in the United States, often in the name of
religious tradition. We can no longer afford to place religion on the sidelines of
international relations if we are to understand todays global divisions.

Gendering International Political Economy

Not only are the confrontational politics of the war on terror and the religious
passions it ignites dividing the world, the consequences of neoliberal economic
policiesFan important component of the National Security Strategy discussed
earlierFare also responsible for the growing gap between rich and poor, both
within states and between them. Although much of the analysis carried out on the
 J. ANN TICKNER 391

international political economy (IPE) focuses on the world of production, trade,

and finance, feminist IPE has looked at the underside of the global economyFat
what feminists describe as the global division of labor. In their study of Filipina
domestic workers in Hong Kong, Kimberly Chang and L. H. M. Ling (2000:27)
describe two processes of economic globalization. First is the structurally integrated
world of global finance, production, and tradeFthe world of marketsFpopulated
primarily by men. The second process is more explicitly sexualized, racialized, and
class-based and consists of low-wage, low-skilled menial service, provided by mostly
female migrant workers who perform intimate household services. If we look more
generally at the underside of the global economyFbeyond the boundaries of much
IPE analysisFwe find that non- or under-remunerated labor is disproportionately
performed by women. Cynthia Enloe (2004:5764) has documented the employ-
ment of low-paid, mostly female workers in Reebok and Nike factories in South
Korea, Indonesia, and China. Companies prefer 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. The preference for young
women workers rests on the patriarchic assumptions that women are more docile,
better at enduring monotonous tasks, available for low wages, and have a natural
talent for work requiring manual dexterity (Quintero-Ramrez 2002:242). These
assumptions depend on gendered constructions of female workers as daughters
earning dowry money or providing added support for their families, rather than as
breadwinnersFa historical category generally assigned to men.
Feminist IPE has also brought to our attention the importance to the global
economy of home-based labor (Pru gl 1999). 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 or home-based workers who are easily hired
and fired. Because women, often of necessity, prefer work that more easily accom-
modates to family responsibilities, the vast majority of home-based workers are
women. Traditional notions regarding the division of labor that define women as
housewives, a category associated with the expectation that labor is free, legitimizes
wages at below subsistence levels. Low wages and poor working conditions have
been justified on the grounds that home-based work is not real work because it
takes place in the private reproductive sphere of the household rather than in the
more valued public sphere of production.
Even when women do benefit from entering the workforce, they continue to
carry most of the responsibility for household labor, a role that is crucial for the
reproduction of labor necessary for waged work. According to the United Nations
Development Programs rough estimates in 1995, if unpaid activities were valued
at prevailing wages, they would amount to $16 trillion or about 70% of world
output. Almost 69% of the $16 trillion represents womens work (Benera 2003:74).
Nevertheless, our scholarship continues to divide and render invisible reproductive
and subsistence work. Feminists have claimed that the female domain of production
and reproduction, just described, which provides the necessary infrastructure for
the male world, is uninteresting to many social scientists and largely underconcep-
tualized (Acker, Barry, and Esseveld 1996:60). Feminists in IPE and economics are
working to develop new tools to understand why womens work is disproportion-
ately underremunerated and undervalued and thus exploited. Values, such as in-
dividualism and free markets, have historically been based on a male norm of
rational atomistic individuals maximizing monetarized welfare through market ex-
change. The market economy has always depended for reproductive and caring
tasks on a large pool of unremunerated, usually female, labor.
Choices that women make, or that are made for them, about employment are
frequently based on values, such as caring, that are emphasized in female social-
ization. Redefinitions of labor to include reproductive and caring labor would not
only make womens work more visible but also challenge us to think about ways to
392 On The Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge and Power?

end the exploitation it involves. Such redefinitions would also lead us to expand the
boundaries of our knowledge and give us a deeper understanding of the workings
of the global economy, which could not function as it does without this substantial
body of unremunerated work. Rational choice-driven economic analysis alone can-
not explain this gendered division of labor; it also requires sociologically based
interpretive understandings of gender role expectations about what women do and
the constraints that these expectations place on them, albeit with wide variations
depending on race, class, and location.

In Conclusion
Being the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge gives one a claim to
ones own history, a pride in ones past, a sense of agency in determining ones
futureFand even the teleological possibility of envisaging historys end (Fukuyama
1989). It also offers a sense of empowerment rarely afforded to those on
the underside of empire. Feminist scholars in international relations have
taken responsibility for offering us some glimpses into the lives of those who
have not been the subjects of history and whose agency gets ignored when we
decide what counts as knowledge about global politics. They are examining ways in
which our theoretical and practical understandings of national security, human
rights, and the global economy are gendered and are suggesting some feminist
reformulations that could help us get beyond these divisions. They challenge us
to re-imagine how theorizing takes place, proposing that it is not only from know-
ledge but also from practice that we build explanations and understandings
(Enloe 2004:175).
As I have suggested, feminist scholars and feminist global networks working
for womens rights are not only trying to implement legislation, they are also
redefining the meaning of human rights beyond its Western individualistic public-
sphere focus to include family and structural violence. The shared concerns
of feminist theologians from different religions open up new possibilities for
dialogue, mutual respect, and different paths to democracy. Feminist theologians
from all religions advocate a dialogic contextual model of knowledge-building
through which knowledge emerges from conversations with texts and subjects
rather than being imposed from above. Secular feminists also advocate a dialogic
contextual model of knowledge-building; consider Brooke Ackerlys (2000) model
of social criticism that is defined as an ongoing process of bringing about
incremental, uncoerced social change. Feminist political economists (see, for
example, Peterson 2003) urge us to include more sociological identity-based
knowledge frameworks in our analyses of the global economy. All of these refor-
mulations are suggesting that there are different, less divisive paths to building
democracy and knowledge.
Said (1996:184185) challenges us with the following statement. The role of the
intellectual is to say truth to power, to address the central authority in every society
without hypocrisy, and to choose the method, the style, the critique best suited for these
purposes. For some, this choice has meant direct engagement with the policy world;
for others, it has meant remaining on the sidelines and engaging in critical skep-
ticism. Even though each of us is differently positioned on these various frontlines
and sidelines, both in the policy world and in the academy, surely all of us bear the
responsibility for being critically reflective about how the knowledge we teach to our
students has been constructed historically and how the research traditions to which
we subscribe are formulated. And often these are in ways that are exclusionary. We
must all ask ourselves how our scholarship and teaching in this new age of empire
might contribute, even unknowingly, to dividing the world. Most of us do not feel
any responsibility for reading or assigning texts that are not authored in the West or
by non-English-speaking scholars. There is an unspoken assumption in the social
 J. ANN TICKNER 393

sciences that theorizing occurs in the core whereas the objects of our theorizing are
often located in the periphery. These assumptions and practices must change.
And, in these times of academic censorship, we must all respect and support
scholarly pluralism and protest efforts to enforce intellectual conformity
from wherever they may arise. We must encourage our students when they want
to look beyond divisions encouraged by our disciplinary frameworks. We must
support their efforts to pursue research questions that are not fashionable, about
which little data are available, and that sometimes raise embarrassing questions.
Whatever our methodological predispositions, we should all be tolerant of non-
conventional methodologies that may be more suited to analyzing some of the
research questions that I have discussed. New questions, new concepts and def-
initions, and new modes of analysis are essential tools for seeing beyond the ideo-
logical and epistemological boundaries that are driving global politics and
inhibiting our quest to understand them.

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