Stirring Gender into the Mainstream: Constructivism, Feminism and the Uses of IR Theory

Abstract

The point of “Gender Theory in World Politics: Contributions of a Non-Feminist Standpoint?” (Carpenter 2002) was not to delineate new parameters for gender in IR but to kindle some dialogue about the nature of those parameters, if indeed any could be said to exist. The basic premises of the argument are: mainstream IR scholars ignore gender at the risk of inadequately understanding social reality and at least some forms of gender analysis can be incorporated into mainstream constructivism as constructivism rather than as part of an explicitly feminist project. The comments that follow represent an ongoing rumination about these points with feminist and non-feminist colleagues. They address the following questions: (1) How is the gender-constructivism proposed in Carpenter (2002) similar to and different from IR feminism, and (2) where is the value-added of incorporating gender into conventional IR research without simultaneously claiming to be doing...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.