ABSTRACT
What’s an IR scholar to do about feminism? This is a question that has troubled IR scholars for decades. While feminist debates engaged people in social and political spaces outside the discipline of IR, IR scholars did their best not to see the relevance of feminism for their own debates. That didn’t stop some feminists from rethinking key IR concepts like power through feminism (Carroll, 1972), but such contributions were largely ignored by IR scholars until recently (Murphy, 1996; Pettman, 1998). It was only in the late 1980s when feminist questions pushed their way onto the IR agenda through books, journals, and conferences that feminism suddenly seemed attractive to IR scholars.
