Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184277980X ISBN 13: 9781842779804

Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The reality of international relations and its academic study are still almost entirely constituted by men. Rethinking the Man Question is a crucial investigation and reinvigoration of debates about gender and international relations.

Following on from the seminal The Man Question in International Relations this book looks at the increasingly violent and 'toxic' nature of world politics post 9/11. Contributors including Raewyn Connell, Kimberley Hutchings, Cynthia Enloe, Kevin Dunn and Sandra Whitworth consider the diverse theoretical and practical implications of masculinity for international relations in the modern world. Covering theoretical issues including masculine theories of war, masculinity and the military, cyborg soldiers, post-traumatic stress disorder and white male privilege. The book also focuses on the ways in which masculinity configures world events from conscientious objection in South Africa to 'porno-nationalism' in India, from myths and heroes in Kosovo to the makings of Zimbabwe.

This essential work will define the field for many years to come.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane L. Parpart is Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in International Development Studies, Gender and Women's Studies and History. She is currently visiting professor at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at the University of West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago. She has co-edited a number of volumes, including The Man Question in International Relations (1998), Gender, Conflict and Peacekeeping (2005) and Rethinking Empowerment (2002). She has written extensively on gender and development, gender, development and violence and urban history in Southern Africa.

Marysia Zalewski is Director of Gender Studies in the School of Social Science at the University of Aberdeen. Her research and teaching interests include theories of feminism and gender, critical International Relations theory and masculinity studies. She is the author of numerous chapters, articles and books including The Man Question in International Relations (1998), Feminism after Postmodernism (2001) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (2004) and Intervening in Northern Ireland: Critically re-thinking representations of the conflict (2007).

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Rethinking the Man Question

Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations

By Jane L. Parpart, Marysia Zalewski

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2008 Jane L. Parpart and Marysia Zalewski
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84277-980-4

Contents

Acknowledgements, vi, 
Preface: the man question, gender and global power by Raewyn Connell, viii, 
Introduction: rethinking the man question Marysia Zalewski and Jane L. Parpart, 1, 
1 Cognitive short cuts Kimberly Hutchings, 23, 
2 Interrogating white male privilege Kevin Dunn, 47, 
3 The machine in the man Terrell Carver, 70, 
4 Bodies of technology and the politics of the flesh Cristina Masters, 87, 
5 Militarized masculinity and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sandra Whitworth, 109, 
6 Contesting the masculine state Daniel Conway, 127, 
7 National myths and the creation of heroes Jamie Munn, 143, 
8 'Porno-nationalism' and the male subject Dibyesh Anand, 163, 
9 Masculinity/ies, gender and violence in the struggle for Zimbabwe Jane L. Parpart, 181, 
Afterword by Cynthia Enloe, 204, 
Notes on contributors, 207, 
Index, 211, 

CHAPTER 1

Cognitive short cuts

KIMBERLY HUTCHINGS

Since the end of the cold war, there has been a flowering of theoretical debate about the frameworks through which contemporary international politics should be understood. This has included the narratives of 'end of history' and 'clash of civilizations', reassertions of mainstream liberal and realist paradigms in the study of international relations, and optimistic and pessimistic accounts of globalization. It has also included the development of feminist approaches to understanding international politics. Although the latter have developed in parallel with the rest, they have had little impact on the ways in which international politics is framed when it comes to the 'big pictures' through which we make sense of politics, both in academic debate and at a more popular level. In 1998, in the precursor to this volume, Peterson and True called for international relations theory to engage in 'new conversations' adequate to 'new times' by taking seriously feminist contributions to the field (1998: 15). Non-feminist mainstream and critical approaches to international politics have not by and large, however, been persuaded that gender has anything other than a marginal relevance for grand theories of the post-cold-war world.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine one of the reasons for this ongoing marginalization of feminist/gender concerns. I will argue that a key reason for the ongoing invisibility of women and gender in the theoretical frames through which post-cold-war international politics is grasped is the legitimizing function of masculinity discourses within those theories. My central claim is that masculinity operates as a resource for thought in theorizing international politics. That is to say, masculinity operates as a kind of commonsense, implicit, often unconscious shorthand for processes of explanatory and normative judgement, thereby as one of the crucial ways in which our social scientific imagination is shaped and limited. I will explore how this works in two very influential but different accounts of contemporary international politics: the 'offensive' realism of Mearsheimer (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001) and the post-Marxist story of 'empire/multitude' in the work of Hardt and Negri (Empire, 2000). In conclusion, I will argue that one can hope, to paraphrase Ferguson, to loosen the hold of masculinity on meaning and life only once one has first appreciated how much intellectual work is accomplished by masculinity's logical structure (Ferguson 1993: 29). Without the logic of masculinity, grand theorists of international politics would be required to work a great deal harder in order to persuade us of the accuracy of their diagnoses of the times.

What is 'masculinity' in international politics?

The concept of masculinity has always been a focus of concern for feminist international relations scholars (Zalewski 1998). In this section, my aim is to analyse the ways in which masculinity has been understood within feminist work on international relations, including work that adopts the notion of 'hegemonic masculinity' as a key analytical tool. I will argue that there are two predominant narratives of masculinity within this literature, which are analytically distinguishable but usually intertwined within particular feminist arguments. Crudely speaking, one of these narratives focuses attention on what masculinity is as a condition for what it does; the other focuses attention on what masculinity does as definitive of what it is. The former directs us to causal or constitutive links between the ways in which international politics is practised or theorized and the qualities associated with masculinity which can be seen as aggression, instrumental rationality or objectivity. The latter directs us to the rhetorical work of valorization, denigration and exclusion done by the formal, relational properties of masculinity as a concept, regardless of the substantive qualities in question. Compare, for instance, Tickner's account of the constitutive role of masculinity in the understanding and conduct of world politics discussed below with the argument of Ashworth and Swatuk. They show how identification of one's own position with masculinity and that of one's opponents with femininity operates as a way of trumping the opposition in debates between 'realists' and 'liberals' about the nature of international politics (Tickner 1991, 1992; Ashworth and Swatuk 1998).

As mentioned above, it is rare to find feminist work on international relations that operates with only one of the above accounts of masculinity; in most cases they are combined. For instance, if we look at pioneering feminist arguments such as those of Cohn (1989), Elshtain (1995 [1987]), Enloe (1989) and Tickner (1991, 1992), then we find that the analysis of masculinity appears in both guises. In her analysis of the discourses of nuclear defence intellectuals, Cohn identifies masculinity with a specific set of attributes, which are shown to be efficacious for the kind of reasoning necessary for thinking about operating weapons of mass destruction (Cohn 1989: 115–19). She also points, however, to the ways in which masculinity operates as a marker of value across its association with qualities that are by no means consistent with one another (strategic rationality, God-like powers of creation, risk taking). Regardless of its substantive association in any given instance, masculinity is always valued; and its value is associated with the denigration and exclusion of the feminine (ibid.: 121). Similarly, Elshtain's argument elaborates a set of masculine qualities that, along with their feminine counterparts, sustain the social institution of war and demonstrates how the same value hierarchy, in which masculinity trumps femininity, subsists across different aspects of masculinity in different contexts (Elshtain 1995 [1987]: 194–225).

From a feminist point of view, masculinity poses a problem in two different ways. It is a problem insofar as masculine identities have concrete effects, for instance in the perpetuation of nuclear deterrence and war. In addition, masculinity is a problem because it incorporates a hierarchical logic of exclusion of women and the feminine. What remains unclear is the relation between the two problems: does the hierarchical logic of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Bloomsbury 3PL
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 184277980X
• ISBN 13: 9781842779804
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 234
• Herausgeber: Parpart Jane L., Zalewski Marysia
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar