International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Feminists working in International Relations (IR) have been troubled for more than 20 years about the field's implied or stated boundaries. For the first 10 years of the existence of feminist IR (roughly 1985–95), its main goal was to challenge a caged-in knowledge realm that excluded more phenomena than it went out to seek. Unnervingly, IR restricted the scope of the international, the relations of the international, the methodologies one could legitimately bring to bear, and the topics that could pass muster by the field; and IR was almost entirely uninterested in the gendered story lines its boundaries contained and reproduced. Feminism and other Third Debate forces jousted with the field, gradually producing an environment more conducive to creative complexity. By the early twenty-first century, IR had devolved into a camp structure that was able to accommodate on the inside all manner of theories, people, and places ( Sylvester 2007 ); many would find a room of their own, so to speak, at this end of old IR. Yet while feminism contributed to tumbled boundaries of IR, it did so against the backdrop of internal boundary dilemmas of inside and outside, good women/bad women, authentic versus dominant voice, gender versus feminism, and so on. This essay considers several interlocking story lines that have constituted and challenged feminism as it troubles ... log in or subscribe to read full text