Actually, the title for this post should refer to Hermione Granger since she is the one doing the smashing of patriarchy in this amusing and insightful take on feminism in the world of Harry Potter. The language is not safe for work.
Today it was announced that the combat ban for women will be fully removed within the US military. This reverses a long-standing policy that restricts women from serving below the brigade level  in...
The International Feminist Journal of Politics announces its 2nd Annual IFjP Conference, May 17-19, 2013, University of Sussex, Brighton, England: (Im)possibly Queer International Feminisms General...
The world has payed attention to the gang-rape of a young woman (her name has not been made widely public) in Delhi and her struggle to survive over the last few weeks. The reports of the brutal...
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...
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...
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 -...
(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...
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...
Other duties have prevented me from posting as much as I'd like to for the past couple of months, but now that the summer is really upon us I am going to try to make more regular appearances. I received a query from a reader that seemed quite appropriate for the Methodology411, so here we go:Mada asks: "Is there a feminist methodology? And if so, what does it consist of?"By way of kick-starting a discussion, I reply: You ask a deceptively complicated question, one that feminist scholars have been wrestling with for a long time. Part of the complexity stems from the fact that there are many...
While I am generally respectful of the journal International Security's clear effort to publish more gender-related work, Bradley Thayer and Valerie Hudson, in "Sex and the Shaheed" have managed to write about gender while missing the conceptual foundations and research insights of decades of work in feminism, gender, and IR. This article ranges from factually partial at best and inaccurate at worst. It focuses on male suicide terrorists when a significant percentage of suicide terrorists are women. It treats the Middle East as if it were a "real" region and homogenous in respect to...
"I wasn't raped until I was almost ten which is pretty good it seems when I ask around because many have been touched but are afraid to say .... I couldn't tell how many hands he had and people from earth only had two ... You get asked if anything happened and you say well yes he put his hand here and he rubbed me ...and he scared me ...you say the almost-ten-year-old version of f*ck you something happened alright the f*ck he put his hands in my legs and rubbed me all over ...and they say, just so long as nothing happened" (Andrea Dworkin, Mercy, p.11)My first feminist mentors were in the...