ABSTRACT
The title of this textbook can be read in two ways. It is ambiguous, and deliberately so, as it seeks to draw attention not only to the subject matter of the book – ‘gender matters’ in global politics – but also to an epistemological belief espoused by its contributors: that gender matters in global politics.1 As Jindy Pettman argues, ‘it should be possible to write the body into a discipline that tracks power relations and practices which impact so directly and often so devastatingly on actual bodies’ (1997: 105). If this is the case, and in this book various contributors argue that it is, then it behoves us to delve deep into the meaning of the body and explore the implications of studying gender in a global political context. This chapter, then, explores why and how gender matters, and interrogates various conceptions of the body in global politics through the discussion of some key gendered narratives of international relations (and International Relations as an academic discipline). In the second section, I present two accounts of bodies in global politics: bodies in social movements and bodies as scientists. I conclude with a summary of Judith Butler’s work on the performativity of gender and the implications of such theory for the study and practices of global politics.
