ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an account of how lenses work and why they matter in a general sense. It moves to a discussion of International Relations (IR) lenses. Gender may feature in policymaking, women and men may be repositioned, and ideal forms of masculinity may shift, but as long as the power of gender as a meta-lens continues to operate, it will produce and reproduce inequalities, injustices, and crises of global proportion. Dominant codes are infused with normative and ideological beliefs that constitute systems of meaning and valorization, and these can have significant effects on global politics. There are at least two major assumptions associated with a positivist orientation: first, through the application of scientific method, facts can be separated from values; second, subjects and objects can also be categorically separated. As feminist IR lenses have shifted, combined, and recombined through a greater multiplicity of theoretical voices and orientations—creating their own productive tensions—subjects of feminist IR inquiry have also shifted.
