Week 9 – Rethinking War (Laura Sjoberg, Gendering Global Conflict) - Part 1

Gendering Global Conflict, yet another book during the majority of which my reaction was, “Yes! Exactly!” I am particularly drawn to Sjoberg’s quote from Annick Wibben’s work: “the insistence on a singular narrative is itself a form of violence” (p. 41). I think this is something we ought to discuss in class.

Of course, the exclusion of gender perspectives constitutes, as Sjoberg argues, a grave shortcoming of IR as a discipline. Some scholars proclaim to have “heard” the call of feminists for integrating gendered analysis into IR research writ large. Some of these scholars thus “correct” for this by adding a chapter (often at the end) about gender (often framed as a crosscutting issue), as though by doing this it somehow erases the masculinized analytical lenses they employ throughout the majority of the rest of their work! I cannot say with certainty, but it seems to me that this faux-feminism actually does more harm than good. Although it appears to be a step in the right direction on account of the fact that some would argue that a chapter about gender is better than no chapter about gender (and that the perfect cannot become the enemy of the good), a separate gender analysis—particularly one that barely contradicts the underlying assumptions of all the other chapters—gives readers the false comfort that the book is somehow “balanced.” It is about as intellectually honest to say that a chapter about gender balances an otherwise masculine account of international relations as it is to argue that putting more women in power will lead to peace; both are, in my view, laughably disingenuous statements. This practice actually exemplifies the continuing dominance of masculine hierarchies within IR scholarship.

Sjoberg states that the book is “(not only multi-method but) multi-epistemological” (p. 56). What does she mean by this? On what epistemological traditions does she rely? This made me think of something Ann said in class: that some feminists seek to uncover truths and denaturalize assumptions about women’s status by using statistics. Is this what Sjoberg means or is she being somehow more tolerant (or inclusive) of different philosophical ontological orientations?

“I argue that feminist work can only be transformative of war studies if it convinces war studies to transform” (p. 57). Sjoberg argues that it necessarily follows that “convincing” can only occur if there is “engagement”—that feminist work must actively engage with war studies; it cannot simply retreat into debating within its own contours, ignoring the very object that it critiques. How do we know then when engagement causes, as Zalewski says, “critical atrophy” (p. 57)? How can critical theorists (regardless of their substantive orientation—feminist, post-colonialist, Marxist, etc.) learn to recognize what constitutes a decent level of engagement: one that sufficiently participates in discussions with dominant voices so to have persuasive power, but at the same time does not become overwhelmed by the legitimacy it grants those dominant voices?