Revisiting gendered states: feminist imaginings of the state in international relations

Extract

In the volume Revisiting gendered states: feminist imaginings of the state in international relations, editors Swati Parashar, J. Ann Tickner and Jacqui True and their contributors explore the gendered construction of statehood and interstate interactions as well as the gendered impact of state power on citizens. Following in the footsteps of Spike Peterson's 1992 edited volume, Gendered states (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner), this latest offering reaffirms the importance not only of gender to international politics, but also of the state itself, which has been neglected by structural International Relations (IR) theory or treated primarily as a bureaucratic institution in foreign policy research. The volume is divided into four parts, examining the intellectual genealogy of gendered states; the gendered processes of making and sustaining states; challenges to gendered states emanating from queer populations, natural disasters and peacekeeping; and the dynamics of gendered states wrought by conflict and violence.

In revisiting this subject-matter, the book traverses a diverse array of cases, incorporating discussion of the United States, Australia, Sweden and Russia, but also India (in several dimensions), Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Moving beyond a singular focus on liberal democratic states, many contributions probe the post-colonial state and its aspirations. Cross-cutting patterns that emerge throughout the chapters include the mobilization of gendered discourses of protection to justify a range of patriarchal practices, from UN peacekeeping in the global South and Sri Lanka's efforts to control migrant women workers to Putin's paternalist heterosexism in Russia. In numerous instances, masculinist violence and militarism are mobilized to reinforce collective identity, from Australia's reassertion of bounded sovereign borders and emotive appeals in India's Maoist insurgency to ISIS's construction of an Islamic ‘proto-state’ (p. 175) in Syria through the bloody enforcement of rigid gender hierarchy. Moreover, several authors emphasize that models of statehood are in flux, as traditional gendered states are challenged by equally gendered forms of neo-liberal globalization and cultural and religious contestation and backlash. In all these cases, gendered (and often highly anti-feminist) imaginings are centrally constitutive of what states do, are and hope to become.