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[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2005, vol. 30, no. 4]! 2005 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2005/3004-0012$10.00

J . A n n T i c k n e r

Gendering a Discipline: Some Feminist Methodological

Contributions to International Relations

V iewing the U.S. discipline of international relations (IR) from outside,Ole Wæver, a leading European IR scholar, observed that what hecalled “American IR” defines itself in methodological terms (Wæver

1998).1 Indeed, many IR scholars in the United States are identified interms of their methodological preferences rather than the subject matterof their research. The field tends to judge scholarship on how well itoperationalizes and tests existing theories rather than in terms of its the-oretical or methodological innovations. Since positivist research philos-ophies have held the highest prestige in the discipline since the 1970s,this may help explain why feminism came so late to the field. Enteringthe discipline in the late 1980s, feminism has, for the most part, resistedthese positivist approaches, preferring postpositivist orientations. Giventhe centrality of methodological issues, I believe that this is one of themost important reasons why feminism remains on the margins of thediscipline and why feminist IR has generated so much resistance from themainstream.2 Were the discipline to take gender seriously, it would presenta fundamental challenge to the epistemological foundations of the field.3

I should like to thank Sandra Harding for her encouragement and advice.1 I shall use the term IR, since it is the one most frequently used in labeling the discipline.

Many scholars, including many feminists, have some discomfort with the term since it signifiesrelations among states rather than the multiplicity of issues and actors that constitute worldpolitics.

2 I have developed this argument further in Tickner 1997. I define the mainstream asIR scholars who adhere to positivist approaches broadly defined. I define positivism as abelief that the same methodologies can be used to study the natural and social worlds, thatthe social world has regularities like the natural world, that there is a distinction betweenfacts and values, and that the way to determine the truth of statements about the externalworld is by appeal to neutral facts.

3 There is an important exception. Certain scholars use conventional social scientificmethodology to study the effects of gender on foreign policy and on violence. In such casesgender is used as a variable to explain state behavior rather than as a constitutive categoryof analysis. See, e.g., Gallagher 1993; Caprioli 2000; Eichenberg 2003.



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This article will first briefly outline the development of IR in the UnitedStates, including the introduction of feminist perspectives. I focus on theUnited States because it is where the methodological debates are the mostintense and also because U.S. IR has exercised a dominant influence on thediscipline worldwide.4 Then I will review some recent IR feminist schol-arship, focusing on its methodological choices.5 The texts I have chosenare exemplars of a growing body of IR feminist empirical scholarship thatis grounded in methodologies used by postpositivist IR scholars more gen-erally, scholars who are also challenging the dominance of social scientificapproaches. By introducing gender as a central category of analysis, IRfeminist scholarship builds on but goes beyond these approaches, most ofwhich have been as gender blind as the mainstream. This article is intendedto show how the discipline might be different were it to take genderseriously.

The development of IR in the United StatesIn the United States, the discipline of international relations emerged atthe beginning of the twentieth century, in most cases but not always asa subdiscipline of political science. Following World War II, IR developedits own disciplinary identity, although it generally remained within politicalscience departments.6 Supported by a uniquely American conviction thatmost problems can be resolved by science, and largely abandoning itshistorical, sociological, and legal foundations, IR became increasinglycommitted to social scientific research. Methodologies from the naturalsciences and economics were employed in theory building, the goal ofwhich was to discover laws and regularities of states’ international behav-ior, particularly with respect to matters of international conflict and war,

4 This may be changing as Europeans become more assertive in reacting against U.S.rational choice and game theoretic models (Wæver 1998). Interestingly, this is happeningat the same time as the rest of the world is taking a more assertive stance against theunilateralism of U.S. foreign policy.

5 Following Sandra Harding (1987, 2–3), I define methodology as a theory and analysisof how research does or should proceed.

6 There are some exceptions. Many of the Washington, DC–based universities that pri-marily train students for policy positions such as the foreign service have schools or depart-ments of international relations separate from political science. These departments, alongwith some other schools of international relations, such as the one at the University ofSouthern California, are generally less committed to teaching only social scientific meth-odologies than are political science departments. For a historical account of the developmentof IR and its different paths in the United States and Europe, see Wæver 1998.



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a phenomenon that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century.7

Many IR theorists believed that the search for systematic inquiry and causalexplanation might contribute to efforts toward diminishing the likelihoodof future conflict. Many of the early postwar international theorists wereEuropean intellectuals fleeing from Nazi persecution. Motivated by thegoal of defending the autonomy of rational inquiry against totalitarianideologies, these theorists made efforts to put the discipline on a “sci-entific” footing that also seemed appropriate for a great power leadingthe fight against another dangerous ideology, global communism. As theUnited States rose to a hegemonic position in the world, so U.S. IR cameto dominate the discipline as a whole.

Beginning in the 1970s, economics, judged the most “scientific” of thesocial sciences, played an increasingly influential role in IR’s methodologicalchoices. Rational choice theories and noncooperative game theoretic modelsbecame popular means of explaining the optimizing behavior of self-inter-ested power-seeking states. These positivist methodological preferenceswent hand in hand with certain assumptions or worldviews. Realism, themost influential IR theory in the United States since 1945, portrays a worldof “anarchy” where there is no sovereign power above states with the abilityto sanction their actions. The result is an international system in which eachstate must act to provide its own security and survival through self-help andthe accumulation of power. At best this “security dilemma,” the tensionthat results when states build their own capabilities in order to be secureand thereby appear threatening to others, results in a balance of powerbetween states; at worst it results in the outbreak of conflict, which realistssee as an ever-recurring phenomenon. Realists distinguish this dangerousanarchical international system from a domestic space within states wherelaw and order, backed by legal sanctions, prevail. Realists portray states asunitary rational actors whose behavior can be understood in terms of theimperatives of the system of anarchy.

This worldview resonated with the foreign policy interests and concernsof the United States during the cold war. Liberalism, which assumes amore benign view of the international system, provided a challenge torealism in terms of its worldview but not in terms of its methodologies.Most liberal IR theorists also see states’ behavior as amenable to expla-nations based on rational choice and game theoretic models. Cooperationis explained in terms of rational self-interest. Since the 1970s both realism

7 For a critical, more European account of why IR evolved in the United States in this“scientific” form, see Hoffmann 1977. Subliteratures on international cooperation and con-flict resolution also developed during that time.



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and liberalism have shared a methodological commitment to putting IRon an ever firmer “scientific” footing.

An anarchical world, in which the behavior of states is explained interms of system-level-determined rational choice models, is closer to themodels found in economics and physics than to those in other socialsciences such as sociology or history. Indeed, the sociological tradition,more prevalent in European IR, nearly disappeared from U.S. IR as ra-tional choice methodologies became predominant. While Marxist theoriesgained some recognition in the 1970s, when economic issues and the warin Vietnam began to dominate the global agenda, the anticommunism ofthe cold war put them at a severe disadvantage. Since the end of the coldwar and the demise of socialism in Russia and Eastern and Central Europe,together with the dominance of a consensus about neoliberal economicsin Western governments and in international financial and trade institu-tions, Marxism and related critical theorizing approaches have recededeven further from the mainstream of U.S. IR.

The preference for rational choice and positivist methodologies has notbeen without challenge, however. In the late 1980s certain IR scholars,many of whom were located in the United States but whose work emergedout of methodological traditions more prevalent in Europe and Canada,mounted what has been called IR’s “third debate.” Scholars divided alongepistemological and methodological lines broadly defined as positivist andpostpostivist (Lapid 1989).8 While “debate” is something of a misnomersince the mainstream has, with certain exceptions, largely ignored suchchallenges, scholars based in a variety of theoretical approaches and meth-odological orientations, including critical theory, historical sociology, dis-course and linguistic analysis, and postmodernism, began to challenge thepositivist foundations of the field. While these newer approaches are by nomeans united in terms of their worldviews or their methodological pref-erences, they do agree on a skepticism about the ability of social scientifictheories to offer us an adequate understanding of world politics.

Feminism enters IRFeminist scholarship entered IR at the end of the 1980s at about the sametime as the third debate.9 Most IR feminists have rejected positivist meth-

8 Positivism and postpositivism are labels generally used by critics rather than by mainstreamscholars, who rightly disavow being labeled positivists in the strict sense of the term, althoughthey are close to the definition in n. 2. See Keohane 1998. It is generally postpositivists whohave undertaken critical reflections on epistemology and methodology.

9 I define IR feminists as a group of scholars who read and refer to one another’s work



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odologies in the sense I have defined them, preferring hermeneutic, his-torically contingent, sociological, and/or ethnographically based meth-odologies to those influenced by the natural sciences and economics. Likefeminists in other disciplines, IR feminists have claimed that instrumentalrationality, based on rational choice theory, is a model extrapolated fromthe highly individualistic competitive behavior of Western men in themarketplace, which IR theorists have generalized to the behavior of states.Rather than uncritically assume the state as a given unit of analysis, IRfeminists have investigated the constitutive features and identities of “gen-dered states” and their implications for women’s and men’s lives (Peterson1992). Feminists have asked whether it makes a difference that mostforeign policy leaders in the world are men and why women remain sofundamentally disempowered in matters of foreign and military policy.They have questioned why states’ foreign policies are so often legitimatedin terms of typically hegemonic masculine characteristics and why warshave been fought mostly by men. These constitutive questions have rarelybeen asked in IR; they are questions that probably could not be askedwithin the epistemological and methodological boundaries of positivistsocial science.

Like feminists in other disciplines, IR feminists have expressed skepticismtoward a body of knowledge that, while it claims to be universal and ob-jective, is in reality based on knowledge primarily from men’s lives. Anontology based on unitary states operating in an asocial, anarchical inter-national environment does not provide an entry point for feminist theoriesgrounded in an epistemology that takes social relations, particularly genderrelations, as its central category of analysis. Feminist ontology is based onsocial relations that are constituted by historically contingent unequal po-litical, economic, and social structures. Unlike practitioners of conventionalsocial science IR, IR feminists generally prefer historical or sociologicalanalyses that begin with individuals and the hierarchical social relations inwhich their lives are situated.

Whereas much of IR is focused on explaining the behavior of states,

and whose disciplinary home is IR. Many of them are members of the Feminist Theory andGender Studies section of the International Studies Association or its equivalent in the BritishInternational Studies Association. Their work covers an array of topics and approaches to whichI cannot do justice in the space of this article. There are also many other feminist scholars fromdifferent disciplines who have made important contributions to our understanding of inter-national politics, international conflict, and the global economy, many of them before the 1980s.The International Studies Association, an interdisciplinary professional association of interna-tional relations scholars, has been a more methodologically pluralistic environment for inter-national relations than the American Political Science Association.



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feminists are motivated by emancipatory goals—investigating the oftendisadvantaged lives of women within states or international institutionsand structures in order to change them. Starting its investigations fromthe perspective of the lives of individuals on the margins who have neverbeen the subject matter of IR, feminist analysis is often bottom-up ratherthan top-down. Feminists in IR are linking the everyday lived experiencesof women with the constitution and exercise of political and economicpower at state and global levels. They have focused on the effects ofinternational politics and the world economy on relational and distribu-tional gender inequality and on how gender inequalities serve to supportthese same structures. Identity issues, including race and culture as wellas gender, have been at the core of feminist investigations. Feminists inIR are demonstrating how gender is a pervasive feature of internationallife and international politics, the implications of which go well beyondits effects on women.

Some feminist methodological contributionsIn the early 1990s, “first generation” IR feminists challenged the mas-culinist biases of the core assumptions and concepts of the field and dem-onstrated how the theory and practice of international relations is gen-dered.10 “Second generation” scholarship has investigated a variety ofempirical cases, making gender and women’s lives visible.11 For the pur-pose of this article I discuss three feminist empirical case studies that aregrounded in methodological orientations used by postpositivist IR schol-ars.12 Each of them rejects positivism in the sense in which I have definedit. They share a concern for sociological, identity-based, interpretive, orlinguistic methodologies. They are unique, however, in making women’slives visible and in using gender as a central category of analysis. ChristineChin’s In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and theMalaysian “Modernity” Project (1998) builds on Marxist/Gramscian crit-ical theory introduced into IR by Canadian scholar Robert Cox and re-

10 Enloe 1989; Peterson 1992; Tickner 1992; Sylvester 1994.11 Of course, there is considerable overlap. New work on reframing IR in gendered terms

continues. See Tickner 2001 and Peterson 2003. And the same scholars may do both kindsof research.

12 I chose these three because each represents a different postpositivist methodologicalperspective and because all three explicitly engage the IR approach out of which they constructtheir own feminist perspective.



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formulated in a feminist framework by Sandra Whitworth (1994).13 Elis-abeth Prugl’s The Global Construction of Gender: Home-Based Work in thePolitical Economy of the 20th Century (1999) is grounded in linguisticconstructivism, associated in IR with the work of international theoristNicholas Greenwood Onuf (1989). Charlotte Hooper’s Manly States:Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics (2001) is basedin political theory and textual analysis.14 Each of these scholars’ textsillustrates the ways in which gender analysis deepens these postpositivistmethodological frameworks and supports feminists’ claims that gender isa constitutive feature of international politics and the global economy aswell as of the discipline of international relations.

Gendering critical theoryCritical international relations theory has been influenced by two strandsof critical thought—the Frankfurt School, most notably through the workof Jurgen Habermas, and the Marxist theory of Italian theorist AntonioGramsci. Scholars who write about political economy tend to be Gram-scians, while those associated with the Frankfurt School tend to be rootedin political and normative theory. Both schools share an interest in humanemancipation in the study of world politics (Wyn Jones 2001, 5–9). Gram-sci reformulated Marxist materialism, emphasizing the importance of thecultural dimensions of politics. He is well known for his claim that ahegemony of ideas defines the limits of historical possibilities. In the con-temporary world, a hegemony of ideas legitimizes the state and capitalismand helps ensure support for these institutions even from those whoseinterests they do not serve.

13 Cox is an emeritus professor at York University in Canada. Deborah Stienstra (1994)and Sandra Whitworth (1994) both use but go beyond a Coxian framework in their studiesof the gendering of social movements and international institutions. Jacqui True (2003),also a PhD from York University, also uses a Coxian framework in her research on womenin the postcommunist Czech Republic. Chin acknowledges her intellectual debt to the York-MUNS (Multilateralism and the United Nations System) Symposium at York University in1994 in her preface (Chin 1998, xviii). For a useful summary of Cox’s theoretical contri-bution, see Cox 1981.

14 Prugl received her PhD at American University’s School of International Service, whichis located in an interdisciplinary school rather than a political science department. V. SpikePeterson (1992, 2003) and Anne Sisson Runyan (Peterson and Runyan 1999) are alsograduates of this program; all three were students of Onuf, the scholar who first introducedlinguistic constructivism into international relations. Hooper received her PhD from theUniversity of Bristol, UK. Judith Squires, a political theorist, was one of her principal advisors.Catherine Eschle (2001), another British IR feminist, also grounds her study of social move-ments in political theory.



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Cox (1981) is the IR scholar best known for introducing Gramscianthought into international relations. Cox portrays the world in terms ofhistorical structures made up of three categories of reciprocal interactingforces: material conditions, ideas, and institutions. These forces interactat three different levels: production relations, the state-society complex,and historically defined world orders. While ideas are important in legit-imating certain institutions, ideas are the product of human agents inparticular historical and material circumstances; therefore, there is alwaysa potential for human emancipation. Cox emphasized this emancipatorypossibility in his distinction between critical theories and what he callsproblem-solving theories, theories that are similar to those advocated bymethodologically conventional IR theorists. Cox claims that critical theory“stands apart from the prevailing order of the world and asks how thatorder came about and how it might be changed, while problem-solvingtheory takes the world as it finds it and implicitly accepts the prevailingorder as its framework” (Cox 1981, 129–30).

Cox’s historically contingent class analysis, the importance he attachesto ideas, and his commitment to theory’s emancipatory potential parallelIR feminists’ methodological sensitivities. Whitworth, a feminist scholarwho builds on but goes beyond Cox’s framework, claims that understand-ings about gender depend in part on the real, material, lived conditionsof women and men in particular times, circumstances, and places. How-ever, gender depends on more than material conditions, for it is the mean-ings given to reality that constitute gender—ideas that men and womenhave about their relationships to one another. Whitworth suggests thatto use this framework to study international politics we must ask howparticular material conditions and ideas are taken up in particular statesand international institutions (Whitworth 1994, 68–71). Her researchexamines the different ways gender was understood in the InternationalPlanned Parenthood Federation from its inception after World War II andin the International Labor Organization since it began in 1919, and theeffect these understandings had on both institutions’ population policiesat various times in their history. More recently, Chin has used a similarframework in her 1998 case study of foreign female domestic labor inMalaysia.

The basic research question of Chin’s text, In Service and Servitude, is,why is unlegislated low-paying domestic service, peopled mostly by femaledomestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia, increasingly prevalentin the context of constructing a modern, developed Malaysian society byway of export-oriented development (Chin 1998, 4)? Chin suggests that aconventional answer to this question would explain this phenomenon in



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terms of transnational wage differentials that encourage migration for em-ployment. She rejects this answer on the grounds that it fails to explain whystates have become actively involved in facilitating labor migration. De-scribing her research method as “a nonpositivist manner of recovering andgenerating knowledge” (1998, 5), Chin adopts a critically oriented approachthat examines the relationship between domestic service and the develop-mental state and the involvement of the state in all levels of society fromthe household to the transnational. Chin’s emancipatory goals are similarto those of critical theory—to expose existing power relations with theintention of changing them (Chin 1998, 5).

Using a Gramscian framework but elaborating on it in gendered terms,Chin asks how is it that paid domestic reproductive labor, usually per-formed by women, supports, shapes, and legitimizes the late twentieth-century developmental state. As she notes, there has been much work onthe Asian “developmental state” and its mechanisms of coercive powerbut little on how the state has used policies that regulate transnationalmigrant domestic labor as part of this coercive strategy. Chin claims thatthe developmental state is not neutral but is an expression of class, ethnic,racial, and gender-based power, which it exercises through both coercionand the cooptation of forces that could challenge it.

Chin goes beyond critical analysis by introducing gender, class, andrace as relationships of identity and power. She claims that the state, whichis controlled mainly by elite men, is a protector and perpetrator of cap-italist-patriarchal ideologies. The state’s involvement in regulating do-mestic service and policing foreign domestic workers in the name of main-taining social order is not just a personal, private issue, or one to beunderstood solely in terms of relations between employers and their ser-vants, but one that serves the state’s goal of providing the good life forcertain middle-class citizens through repressing others. Winning the sup-port of middle-class families by promoting policies that support materialistconsumption, including the paid labor of domestic servants, has helpedlessen ethnic divisions in Malaysia and has increased loyalty to the stateand hence its security. Support of certain groups is won at the expenseof poor women’s lives and security.

Chin questions the assumption, implicit in economic theory, that cap-italism is the natural order of life. In contrast to Cox’s definition of prob-lem-solving theory and positivism’s acceptance of neutral “facts,” sheclaims that her critical analysis is designed to deconstruct this seeminglynatural “objective” world and reveal the unequal distribution and exerciseof power that inheres in and continues to constitute social relations, in-stitutions, and structures that are shaped by and that shape human beliefs



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(Chin 1998, 17–18). She seeks to understand these global processes fromthe bottom up, and she demonstrates that domestic service is not just a“private” issue but an institution in which the state is actively involvedand one that has regional and international implications.

Gendering IR constructivismConstructivism entered IR during the late 1980s along with other post-positivist theories. Constructivism focuses on the ideational processes thatconstruct the world rather than on given agents and material structurestypical of conventional IR (Wyn Jones 2001, 12–15). Constructivist ap-proaches range broadly, from positivist versions that treat ideas as causesto a postpositivist focus on language. While there are many different ver-sions of constructivism, all agree that international life is social and thatagents and structures are coconstituted. Unlike conventional analysis dis-cussed earlier, constructivist analysis posits that agents such as states andinternational institutions cannot be unproblematically assumed as givenentities when building theories of international politics; rather, actors’identities, the identities they ascribe to others, and how these identitiesare mutually constituted are in need of explanation before we can un-derstand their behavior.

Prugl’s text, The Global Construction of Gender (1999), is groundedin IR constructivism. Prugl takes as her starting point Onuf’s (1989)Wittgensteinian language-based constructivism, which focuses on rules.Onuf identifies rules as a pervasive presence that give political society itsmeaning. When rules distribute advantage unequally, the result is rule thatleads to the persistence of asymmetric social relations (Onuf 1989, 22).Institutions, including international institutions, are patterns of rules andrelated practices. International relations are constructed when people talk,follow rules, and engage in various social practices. Onuf does not drawa sharp distinction between material and social realities; people and so-cieties coconstruct each other (Onuf 1989, 41).

Since most feminists see gender as a social construction, Prugl claimsthat Onuf’s constructivism can provide a useful methodological entrypoint for feminist IR. She proposes a “feminist constructivism” that putslanguage at its center. Her feminist elaboration portrays gender as aninstitution that codifies power—a constellation of rules and related prac-tices that distribute privilege and create patterns of subordination that cutacross other institutions, from the household to the state and the economy(Prugl 1999, 13). She distinguishes her feminist constructivism from otherforms of IR constructivism, not only because hers takes gender as a centralcategory of analysis but also because of its concern with the ways in which



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social practice carries codes of power that are intersubjectively constitutedwith categories such as gender, race, and class. Rather than assuming ananarchical international system, Prugl posits a global social space inhabitedby social movements and international organizations. This allows her totalk about gender relations. Prugl claims that the purpose of her study isto show how gender politics pervade world politics; international politicsis one set of practices engaged in gender construction, which it enactsthrough international institutions.

Prugl’s case study examines the debates over the rules that regulatedhome-based work throughout the twentieth century. The climax of thisdebate was the adoption of the International Labor Organization’s (ILO)Homework Convention in 1996, when certain rules were adopted thatsignaled a step toward the institutionalization of rights for home-basedworkers. Prugl’s evidence came from tracking the efforts of the Self-Em-ployed Women’s Association of India (SEWA) and HomeNet Interna-tional, an international network of home-based workers. She also usedevidence from documents relating to debates within the ILO. Since themajority of home-based workers are women, this was an important debatefrom a feminist perspective; low wages and poor working conditions havebeen justified on the grounds that home-based work is not “real” worksince it takes place in the private reproductive sphere of the householdrather than in the more valued public sphere of production. Prugl ex-amines how social movements and the ILO engaged in conversations witha diverse set of agents such as states, private companies, and trade unionsto bring about a change in the way these various institutions defined work,thus leading to a change in the gender rules governing home-basedemployment.

Prugl is conscious that her choice to focus on global movements andinternational organizations removes her study from the experiences of in-dividual home-based workers. She is aware that this may open her up tocriticisms by contemporary feminists who argue for situated knowledgebased on the cultural, racial, and class-based particularities of women’s lives,an epistemological position that has also been evident in IR feminist em-pirical research (Moon 1997; Chin 1998; True 2003). She defends herfocus on global politics by suggesting that certain feminists have confusedthe universal and the global, tending to see them as synonymous. Pruglcontends that whereas universal refers to theories that claim logical uni-versality, implying that sources of oppression are the same for all women,the global is a “social space that emerges from diverse interactions of in-fluentials across state boundaries” (1999, 148–49). Global networks createhistorically specific rules, and international organizations are sites where



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global processes resulting from intense negotiation among a variety of actorsbecome visible. Since these are political spaces that provide openings foralternative interpretations, Prugl sees them as sites for emancipation.

Gendering textual analysisHooper’s text, Manly States (2001), is grounded in feminist theory, men’sstudies, IR theory, and cultural studies. Her central question is, what roledoes international relations theory and practice have in shaping, defining,and legitimating masculinities? How, she asks, might international rela-tions discipline men as much as men shape international relations (Hooper2001, 2)? Hooper rightly claims that, although masculinity is a topic ofcentral importance in international relations and one to which many IRfeminists have alluded, it has not received much systematic attention.15

Hooper defends her focus on masculinity on the grounds that IR theoryand practice is a man’s world.16 She aims to show that gender politicspervades world politics and that gender is a social construct that resultsfrom practices that connect arguments at all levels of politics and society,including the international. Her primary concern is with the role playedby the discipline itself in shaping, defining, and legitimating masculinities(Hooper 2001, 3–4).

Hooper sets about demonstrating the validity of these claims throughan analysis of theories of masculinity and a textual analysis of the Economist,a prestigious British weekly newspaper that covers business and politics.She discusses various historically and culturally contingent theories of heg-emonic masculinities, which she relates to the theoretical constructs ofIR. Hooper claims that we cannot understand international relations un-less we understand the implications of the fact that it is conducted bymen; masculinities are not just domestic cultural variables but the productsof men’s participation in international relations. Military combat and co-lonial administration are some examples on which she draws to show howinternational relations shape men.

Hooper’s analysis of the Economist, looking at issues dated 1989 to1996, is a textual reading that follows the practice of intertextuality usedin cultural studies—“the process by which meanings are circulated be-tween texts through the use of various visual and literary codes and con-ventions” (Hooper 2001, 122). She includes graphs, layout, photos, and

15 For an IR study that does focus on masculinity, see Zalewski and Parpart 1998.16 There is some controversy about this. Some IR feminists see a danger in losing sight

of women when they have only just become the subject matter of international relations.See, e.g., Zalewski 1998.



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advertising material in her analysis, which claims that the newspaper issaturated with signifiers of elitist hegemonic masculinities and that gen-dered messages are encoded in the paper regardless of the intentions ofits publishers or authors.

According to Hooper, the Economist is a booster for neoliberal eco-nomic globalization; its readership includes international business and po-litical elites from around the world. She links the newspaper to IR bysuggesting that it is a frequently cited secondary source for academics ineconomics and international relations, and she compares the newspaper’sworldview with that of mainstream IR. Its aggressive business style, inwhich the business world is portrayed as a Darwinian struggle, and itsdescription of states as rational competitive masculine actors fit the modelsof both realism and liberalism described above. Hooper suggests that thesebusiness and academic worldviews are mutually reinforcing and act toreproduce forms of hegemonic masculinities. Indeed, Hooper’s centralconcern is with her claim that IR as a discipline is heavily implicated inthe construction and promotion of hegemonic masculinities. Her nor-mative goal is to uncover and challenge these gendered constructions—to make the discipline reflective of its gendered foundations as a first steptoward changing them.

ConclusionIn this article I have suggested some reasons why most IR feminists havechosen to conduct their research outside positivist methodological frame-works. The boundary that divides an asocial world of international rela-tions from a domestic political space makes analyses that deal with socialrelations, including race and class as well as gender, difficult. Feminists inIR have also challenged another boundary between the public sphere ofpolitics and economics and the private sphere of families, domestic labor,and reproduction: many of the questions IR feminists are asking intersectand challenge these boundaries. They are questions that probably couldnot be asked within the methodological frameworks of conventional socialscience.

Feminists in IR are concerned with the linkages between the everydaylived experiences of women and the constitution and exercise of politicaland economic power at the state and global levels. They are investigatinghow gender and other hierarchies of power affect those at the margins ofthe system. They are demonstrating how gendered structures of powerinhere in political and economic institutions and structures and what effectthis has on the lives of individuals. Claiming that the discipline that an-



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alyzes global politics is itself gendered, they are showing how IR is im-plicated in the reproduction of masculinist international politics and eco-nomics. Whereas existing theories tend to focus on public life—eitherformal institutions or the market, both of which are associated with menand male political behavior—a focus that includes the private sphere pro-vides a new vantage point from which to analyze the gendered micro/macro linkages that constitute international politics and economics.

Through my examination of three representative texts I have shownhow the postpositivist interpretive methodologies on which they drawprovide more conducive frameworks for investigating these issues. Themethodological frameworks that I have discussed, those based in criticaltheory, linguistic constructivism, and textual analysis, are more amenablethan positivist approaches to incorporating gender as a category of analysis.Critical theory’s commitment to emancipation accords with feminist sen-sibilities, and identity-based theories allow for the investigation of genderas a socially constructed category of analysis. But postpositivist method-ologies have, for the most part, been as gender blind as the mainstream.Therefore, as I have demonstrated, IR feminist research has built on butgone beyond them to construct gender-sensitive methodological frame-works within which to conduct their investigations.

Nevertheless, as V. Spike Peterson has claimed, despite fifteen years ofexplication, IR feminists’ most significant theoretical insights remainlargely invisible to the discipline (Peterson 2004, 44).17 As I noted in myintroduction, U.S. IR has been defined by its methodological debates,and, given the continued predominance of social scientific methodologies,those whose work falls outside these approaches are already at considerabledisadvantage professionally. Including gender analysis in one’s researchcarries added personal and professional risks.18 Methodologies preferredby feminists are not normally part of an IR graduate curriculum in theUnited States, and academic reward structures are skewed in favor of thosewho use conventional methodologies. For these reasons, many IR femi-nists are moving beyond the discipline. Yet I believe that it is importantfor feminists to stay connected; the discipline of IR is where many futureinternational policy makers and activists will learn about international pol-itics and other global issues. And, as I have demonstrated, IR feminists

17 Most of the issue of the Brown Journal of International Affairs in which Peterson’sarticle appears is devoted to the future of feminist theory in IR.

18 The Zalewski and Parpart volume (1998) includes chapters by male IR scholars whoreflect on these risks.



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are contributing in unique and important ways to our understanding ofglobal issues.

School of International RelationsUniversity of Southern California

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———. 2003. A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Re-productive, Productive, and Virtual Economies. New York: Routledge.

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