ABSTRACT
Most definitions of feminism centre on the demand for equality between the sexes or equal rights for women. For this reason, students new to the study of feminism and/in IR often assume that it is about women. As we will see below, feminists do have much to say on the topic of women, on sexual equality and women’s rights. However, this is a very narrow understanding of ‘feminism’which does not fully reflect the richness and breadth of this body of thought. Equality and equal rights issues have never been the sole focus of feminism. Moreover, the study of gender should not be conflated with ‘women’. For example, as the title of Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart’s book The ‘Man’ Question in IR suggests, feminists are as much interested in masculinities and the construction of masculinities in international relations as women and constructed femininities. The term ‘gender’ might be used to refer to men and women (as categories); or it might refer to the material and ideological relations that exist between the two sexes – that is, the term is used to describe one dimension of social relationships. Characteristics which are held to be essentially ‘male’ or ‘female’ vary in different societies and across cultures and prevailing beliefs about gender vary across time. It is difficult to substantiate the argument that gender differences somehow reflect essential differences. In contemporary feminist scholarship gender is more often employed in relation to ideological or discursive constructions of ‘masculinities’ and ‘femininities.’
