Feminist Theory In International Relations

Feminist analysis starts from the significance of gender, gender maybe understood in different kinds of ways but all feminist analyses take gender seriously and when they are thinking about gender they are thinking about ways in which the world can be organized into gender categories such as masculinity and femininity, and the feminists are thinking of ways in which those categories are operating in the terms of hierarchy and in some ways institutionalize and perpetuate some kinds of inequalities.

Feminist analysis start from gender as a hierarchical or relational category and it tries to look at the world in that perspective. The feminist theories in international relations were introduced in the late 1980s and early 90’s (cite) and the early

For example, the work of diplomats often being structured by the division of labor between a diplomat and his wife, which gains complexity when more women diplomats were appointed in the 1990s and suddenly the foreign offices could not work out what to do because there was nobody to do the social side of things that the diplomats wives had traditionally done. Something as central to international relations such as diplomacy turns out to rely on certain kinds of gendered relations which are also relations of power. So that’s the kind of thing that feminist analysis starts to do (para phrase) in international relations. Through the 1990s and 2000s, feminist work expanded to more aspects of international relations which included Economic Globalisation and international political economy where gender divisions of labor and effects of economic changes are really

The assumption is that gender is socially constructed category that comes of out whole systems and layers of meaning that is structured into the way in which the world works and can be unstructured or deconstructed. In that sense, feminism is a part of a constructivist agenda. However, there are tensions between feminist and constructivist works. One of the interesting areas of this is that some constructivists have started to take gender seriously as a kind of cause or variable, and started to talk about the way that gender can influence the actors and people involved in international politics. For example, during the evacuation of people in the wars that lead to the splitting of Yugoslavia in the mid 1990s, It is argued that because of the way that some humanitarian organizations and other organizations took for granted certain assumptions about gender, they failed to notice that it was the men who were the most vulnerable category of the population that were most under threat from the invading forces, and the priority was given to the old, the sick, the women and the children by