ABSTRACT
Following recent scholarship that understands diplomacy as a practice that constitutes world politics through the process by which diplomats construct, not merely represent, national interests, this chapter traces how Hillary Clinton's re-envisioning of US diplomacy along gender-sensitive lines amounts to the first steps in a renegotiation of America's relationship with the world. It analyzes Clinton's rhetoric and policy during her tenure as America's first diplomat using the insights of gender scholarship and discourse analysis to address the broad question of the difference gender makes in US diplomacy and foreign policy. The chapter examines Clinton's identity construction as a mother and her metaphorical promotion of the "investing in women" strategy in order to trace relationships among different conceptions of what it means to be a woman within Clinton's discourse. It investigates discourse analysis of Clinton's memoir of her time as Secretary of State, as well as records of her public speeches, events, statements, and interviews from the US State Department website.
