ABSTRACT
Feminist attempts to incorporate a gender variable into IR analysis are constrained by the basic feminist methodology and all feminists’ normative commitments. A genuinely “feminist approach” by definition “must take women’s lives as the epistemological starting point.”1 And a defining element of feminist approaches is a social project aimed at ameliorating women’s structured lack of privilege and emancipating them as a gender-class. The result is a de facto equating of gender primarily with females/femininity. It is, in its way, a new logocentrism, whereby (elite) male actions and (hegemonic) masculinity are drawn into the narrative mainly as independent variables explaining “gender” oppression. Even those works that have adopted the most inclusive approach to gender, such as Peterson and Runyan’s Global Gender Issues, betray this leaning. Peterson and Runyan do acknowledge that “our attention to gender . . . tends to underplay the considerable differences among men and among women,” and note that “it is not only females but males as well who suffer from rigid gender roles.”2 For the most part in their analysis, though, “gender issues” are presented as coequal with women’s issues. The plight of embodied women is front and center throughout, while the attention paid to the male/masculine realm amounts to little more than lip service.
