Suchergebnisse

A review essay covering a book by Laura Sjoberg, Gendering Global Conflict: Toward a Feminist Theory of War (2013).

In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008/09, there was a remarkable preoccupation in the English-language press with gender relations in finance. Articles adduced masculinity as a variable that may have caused the crisis, speculated about the more prudent investment styles of women, and predicted the fall of macho and the end of men. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir, I argue that this discourse amounted to an exercise in meaning making through the construction of a myth of woman as financially responsible and men as reckless. I interpret the deployment of this myth in the press as a morality play of fall, rise, and redemption. The play provides a narrative that explains the unfamiliar of the crisis, offers a correcting mechanism in the form of prudent woman, and re-assembles a bourgeois worldview of social and economic harmony by advocating more gender diversity in finance. Adapted from the source document.

Diversity management and gender mainstreaming can be considered technologies of government in the Foucaultian sense; that is, they are technologies that guide people to conduct themselves in a particular manner; their purpose is the "conduct of conduct." This article illustrates the value of applying a Foucaultian "analytics of government" to generate insights on the effects of inserting feminist knowledge into institutional contexts through the practices of gender mainstreaming and diversity management. I first reinterpret these strategies as technologies of government that meet the characteristics identified in the literature on governmentality. Second, I explore the liberal rationality of the contemporary apparatus of gender by juxtaposing it to the disciplinary rationality underlying efforts to govern women at the turn of the nineteenth century. Third, I tease out similarities and differences in the way in which diversity management and gender mainstreaming operate, emphasizing, in particular, the way in which they make difference productive and outlining how one deploys a neoliberal logic and the other a bureaucratic logic. Ultimately, I argue that governance feminism should be interpreted as the governmentalization of feminist knowledge; that is, feminist knowledge has been adapted so that it becomes available for the government of conduct. Adapted from the source document.

Feminist international relations is situated uneasily within a subfield of political science, on the one hand, and within an interdisciplinary literature on globalization, on the other. Emerging in the 1990s from a critique of the realist and rationalist IR canon, feminist IR research has diversified considerably, including different lines of theoretical and empirical inquiry and drawing on a range of methods. Adapted from the source document.

The wide adoption of gender mainstreaming has rekindled debates about feminist engagements with the State. The purpose of this article is to provide a clearer specification of power politics in such engagements and develop the conceptual tools to assess the utility of feminist strategies. Drawing on feminist state theory and comparing two feminist strategies (gender mainstreaming and the equal rights strategy), this article develops an analysis of six types of power mechanisms. Feminist engagements with the German agricultural sector are used to illustrate these mechanisms. The campaign to gain women farmers independent pension rights illustrates the mechanisms of compromise and silencing of difference. The current effort to mainstream gender into rural development policies illustrates mechanisms of cooptation and normalization. In both forms of engagement, in addition, there is evidence of women's empowerment and state refusal. The article concludes that the success of both gender mainstreaming and the equal rights strategy is limited because they are sidelined, side-tracked and slowed down by mechanisms of power. Adapted from the source document.

Part of a review symposium on Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2001) argues that, despite making strong case against biological hardwiring, showing that gender is more cultural than biological, & creating a feminist space for critiquing the gendered practices of war fighting, Goldstein has a narrow understanding of theory wedded to a positivist epistemology. Such positivism would be complemented by a reflection on the theory inherent in rhetoric on war & gender. Although Goldstein's definition of gender shares an affinity with constructivist understandings, he moves gender analysis from the arena of construction to an arena of givens, treating it as an explanatory variable. Further, had Goldstein engaged with feminist constructivist theorizations vis-a-vis international relations, he might have avoided his narrow focus on gender as pertaining to the individual level of analysis & revealed gender as an unstable category. The example of efforts to build a European Security & Defense policy is used to illustrate how a post-positivist framework for considering gender as a social construct & an analytical category in a security context moves gender relations beyond the individual level of analysis & exposes the rhetorical power of diverse invocations of gender & the interlinking of gender & war in contemporary debates on European security. 22 References. J. Zendejas