ABSTRACT
One point feminist contributors to IR have made on numerous occasions, and which even sympathetic mainstream academics seem particularly resistant to, is the idea that gender cannot just be grafted onto existing explanatory approaches which are profoundly ‘masculinist’. An adequate analysis of gender requires more radical changes, including an ontological and epistemological revolution. In arguing this, feminists have tried to counter the naive approach to gender which argues along the following lines: if international relations marginalises both women and the feminine, then why can’t women and the feminine be brought in to mainstream approaches in the same way that other previously neglected variables have been incorporated? For that matter, in the interests of’balance’, why can’t a gender focused analysis of men and masculinity also be incorporated into mainstream approaches? This article would like to argue that while in some limited way, it might be possible to add the ‘gender variable’ to the long list of variables which are variously deemed to inform the practices of international relations, to do so would be to exclude analysis of the most salient ingredients of the relationship between gender and international relations. Such ingredients should be of interest to mainstream IR scholars because they are bound up with power politics-albeit power politics of a different sort from the ones usually focused on in the discipline.
