The Duck of Minerva

Laura Sjoberg

Laura Sjoberg is British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London and Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. Her research addresses issues of gender and security, with foci on politically violent women, feminist war theorizing, sexuality in global politics, and political methodology. She teaches, consults, and lectures on gender in global politics, and on international security. Her work has been published in more than 50 books and journals in political science, law, gender studies, international relations, and geography.

Laura Sjoberg is British Academy Global Professor of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway University of London and Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. Her research addresses issues of gender and security, with foci on politically violent women, feminist war theorizing, sexuality in global politics, and political methodology. She teaches, consults, and lectures on gender in global politics, and on international security. Her work has been published in more than 50 books and journals in political science, law, gender studies, international relations, and geography.

Recent Posts

Feminist IR 101, Post #5 War and Security (in Theory)

by | 23 January, 2011 |

There's been a small break (understatement) in my posting as I dealt with some pressing stuff personally and professionally, and to post about some time-sensitive stuff (like Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which I couldn't resist, though I did resist talking about Wikileaks). I will now return to "Feminist IR 101," a series of posts designed to provide audiences that had (intentionally or not) an understanding of feminist approaches to IR that caused them to misinterpret the intentions, goals, and potential contributions of feminist work in IR, particularly when assigning reviewers and performing...

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Against the Tide: A Defense of a J.D.

by | 9 January, 2011 |

This week, the New York Times published a (largely true) piece about the evils of going to law school, echoed by my friends on twitter and in the blogosphere have responded quickly, and in agreement. Like many political science professors, I am constantly telling our students not to go to law school - when 53% of our majors list it as their primary goal after undergraduate school. I even spoke a seminar at UF called "Why NOT go to law school -" and I had a lot of good reasons. After all, I now have a degree I paid $150,000 for (a J.D.) that I use sporadically if at all, and a degree that I...

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The Ugly Underside of the Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

by | 24 December, 2010 |

The repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is official now, signed by the President and a celebration of what is, by most accounts, an incredibly productive lame-duck Congressional session. It is certainly, in my mind, high time that this both on-face ridiculous and insidiously discriminatory policy make its way out of United States law and military practice. It is also, in my mind, just plain stupid the ways in which the United States does not recognize people it perceives to be homosexual as full citizens of the state; the repeal of one of them is a sign that maybe that will be (if slowly)...

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Feminist IR 101, Post #4: Common Myths about Feminist IR (and the ‘truth’)

by | 13 December, 2010 |

Here are some common misperceptions of feminist IR; the "truth" is below the "fold" ...1. Feminist IR is a paradigmatic alternative to other IR paradigms - there's realism, liberalism, constructivism, poststructuralism, and then ... feminism. It is its own "ism," and therefore should be a chapter in each textbook proposed as a dialogue with and/or critique of International Relations. 2. Feminists are whiners - either the field of IR see, e.g., this debate nor global politics (see, e.g., Barbara Ehrenreich's discussion of Abu Ghraib) are sites of rampant gender subordination. 3. Women are...

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Feminist IR 101, Post #3: What is “feminist” about “feminist IR”?

by | 4 December, 2010 |

So I've been accused elsewhere in the blogosphere (not linked here because of profane language) of just posting a lot of overlong (language cleaned up) definitions in service of a poststructuralist cause which is "irrelevant (insert choice words here)." I could get all defensive or argumentative (insert sarcastic comment about feminists here), but I think that I'll those comments as proof that perhaps the explaining needs to continue. I posted all those definitional discussions because it would be easy to misread what came after them without that foundation, which is not obvious or intuitive...

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Feminist IR 101, Post #2….vocabularies for talking about sex/gender hierarchies

by | 29 November, 2010 |

In the last post, I discussed gender as a system of symbolic meanings. People understood to be "men" are often expected to be "masculine" and associated with masculinity/ies; while people understood to be "women" are expected to be feminine, and associated with femininity/ies. Traits associated with masculinities and femininities are often also transposed onto ideas, concepts, and things, in everyday life and in global politics. Masculinities and femininities are often salient in political, economic, and social life.But, like all good political "scientists," you ask the "so what?" question -...

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Feminist IR 101, Post #1 … definitions of sex and gender

by | 24 November, 2010 |

(disclaimer: this is my attempt to define/illustrate; mistakes are mine, not to be assigned to feminist IR as a whole)sex (noun?): traditionally used to refer to the biological characteristics of bodies based on their internal and external sex organs, where persons with "female" organs are "women," and people with "male" organs are men. It can also be divided on the basis of chromosomal characteristics, where people with "XX" are "women," and people with "xy" are men. In actuality, substantially more complicated than that, where there are more than a dozen chromosomal combinations on the...

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A (not so) open letter to a journal editor (or five): Part II

by | 20 November, 2010 |

Dear Dr. Journal Editor, As I mentioned in "Part I" of this letter, I "lost" this battle, and it matters to me.Why? Because it's not just "work" to me that happens to be on a particular topic because it is an interesting question. I believe all knowledge has a politics, acknowledged or not, and I acknowledge mine. I do feminist work because I'm interested in deconstructing gender hierarchies in IR as a discipline and in global politics more generally. I think that such a move would benefit everyone in IR/global politics, not just women (a category I'm not particularly fond of). I don't want...

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A (not so) open letter to a journal editor (or five): Part I

by | 17 November, 2010 |

(a letter I've thought about writing a dozen times over the last decade of being a feminist researcher)Dear Dr. Journal Editor, I submitted an article to your (big) journal in my (general) field. I don't know if it was of the quality to be published in your (spiffy) journal or not, but, to be honest, I was trusting you to figure that out. You betrayed my trust, and in spades. Your journal presents a pluralistic face, and lets in the occasional article that transgresses the norms of traditional social science. In fact, I do a lot of reviews for your journal and many journals like it ... I'm...

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Should I go vote for women because they’re women?

by | 30 October, 2010 |

Reading a recent TIME article on "Why Women Candidates are Talking Tough" inspired me to blog about the upcoming elections a little bit. While there are a record number of women candidates for national office, predictions are that women will lose ground in representational terms. If women pick up any ground (or even don't lose it), it is predicted to be GOP women winning seats and Democratic women losing them. With so many unappealing women to vote for (whose names I'll leave off this blog post to be polite), and so few appealing women to vote for ... what's a progressive, Democratic,...

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