ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the work of three postmodernist feminist writers in international relations: Christine Sylvester, Cynthia Weber and Judith Butler. Contrary to the traditional realist commonsense metaphysical approach, Weber's poststructuralist metaphysics deprives national sovereignty and international intervention of reference; their meanings have been produced in social and political contexts to achieve certain other purposes that are reflections on sovereignty. Weber's argument-structure is essentially a priori, derived from Baudrillard's contentious theory of symbolic exchange. Judith Butler's work, properly interpreted, provides an oblique, but nonetheless genuinely transformative, conception of politics distinctively different from that discernible in modernist feminist international relations. For Butler, as well as her contemporary post-Marxist scholar, the Argentinean Ernesto Laclau, Marxism has to give continual attention to preserving the conflicting character of all social processes if it is to maintain any genuine expectation of achieving radical democracy.
