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This article theorizes Waltz's ‘third image,’ international system structure, through feminist lenses. After briefly reviewing International Relations (IR) analysis of the relationship between anarchy, structure, and war, it introduces gender analysis in IR with a focus on its theorizing of war(s). From this work, it sketches an approach to theorizing international structure through gendered lenses and provides an initial plausibility case for the argument that the international system structure is gender-hierarchical, focusing on its influence on unit (state) function, the distribution of capabilities among units, and the political processes which consistently govern unit interaction. It outlines the implications of an account of the international system as gender-hierarchical for theorizing the causes of war generally and wars specifically, with a focus on potentially testable hypotheses. The article concludes with some ideas about the potential significance of a theorizing gender from a structural perspective and of theorizing structure from through gendered lenses.

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It is important to note at the outset that there is not one feminist perspective on terrorism, but many. As women are different, feminists are different. As there is variety among IR theories, there is variety among IR feminist theories -IR feminist realism, liberalism, constructivism, critical theory, postcolonialism and postmodernism. 1 Since this short discussion piece cannot cover comprehensively IR feminisms' various potential contributions to the study of terrorism, I choose to present a collage of feminist perspectives on the question of terrorism. Some of these are related or complementary, others are divergent and sometimes confl icting. What they share is being inspired by various observations of gender subordination in global politics.The fi rst set of observations in this collage is inspired by one of the oldest questions in feminist IR -where are the women? 2 Women are underrepresented in the study of the perpetration and consequences of the actions that fall within our traditional understandings of terrorism. 3 Most recent work on terrorism omits women altogether. Several recent important books on terrorism, including Bruce Hoffman's Inside Terrorism, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne's edited Worlds in Collision, and Walter Enders and Todd Sandler's The Political Economy of Terrorism, do not contain a listing for 'women' in the index or serious discussions about the gender dynamics or impacts of terrorism. 4 Much work on terrorism treats the 'terrorist' as a subject gendered male by defi nition.Both media presentations and scholarly work that do acknowledge women 'related to' terrorism in some way or another portray them in very gendered terms. Scholars are increasingly recognizing, for example, that women participate in terrorism as terrorists, a role that is not a new development. 5 Still, even work which explicitly addresses women's terrorism frequently characterizes participants as women terrorists rather than as terrorists who happen to be women -placing their gender at the forefront of accounts of their motivation. For example, Mia Bloom's work on women suicide terrorists links their motivation almost exclusively to their status as rape victims. 6 While Robert Pape claims women, like men, are rational actors when they commit acts of terrorism, one of his case studies explains that a woman suicide terrorist was acting rationally when she blew herself up, because it was the practical alternative in her society for woman who was unlikely to marry or have children because she had been raped. 7 In our recent book, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics, 8 Caron Gentry and I argue that women's agency in their political (or even criminal) violence is denied even by those claiming to study women as women because women's incapacity to commit acts of terror is essential to maintaining our current idealized notions of women and femininity. International Relations

Whenever stories of women's violence in global politics are presented in mainstream media, their authors explain away the possibility that women make a conscious choice to kill or injure. Violent women interrupt gender stereotypes: they are not the helpless and peaceful women that soldiers need to protect from enemies in traditional war tales. Instead of acknowledging the falseness of the underlying gender assumptions, public and publicized stories emphasize the singularity and sexual depravity of violent women, an account we call the `whore' narrative. This article considers two types of whore narrative: stories of violent women's erotomania, and of violent women as sexually dysfunctional. Though the whore narrative has been consistently employed historically and cross-culturally, this article identifies a culture-based dimension unique to the war on terror. It argues that analysis of these narratives have important implications for the study of gender in global politics.

This article explores women's presence in military forces around the world, looking both at women's service as soldiers and at the gendered dimensions of their soldiering particularly, and soldiering generally. It uses the 'beautiful soul' narrative to describe women's relationship with war throughout its history, and explores how this image of women's innocence of and abstention from war has often contrasted with women's actual experiences as soldiers and fighters.

This article explores a gendered dimension of war and conflict analysis that has up until now received little attention at the intersection of gender studies and studies of global politics: queer bodies in, and genderqueer significations of, war and conflict. In doing so, the article introduces the concept of cisprivilege to International Relations as a discipline and security studies as a core sub-field. Cisprivilege is an important, but under-explored, element of the constitution of gender and conflict. Whether it be in controversial reactions to the suggestion of United Nations Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that airport screenings for terrorists not discriminate against transgendered people, or in structural violence that is ever-present in the daily lives of many individuals seeking to navigate the heterosexist and cissexist power structures of social and political life, war and conflict is embodied and reifies cissexism. This article makes two inter-related arguments: first, that both the invisibility of genderqueer bodies in historical accounts of warfare and the visibility of genderqueer bodies in contemporary security strategy are forms of discursive violence; and second, that these violences have specific performative functions that can and should be interrogated. After constructing these core arguments, the article explores some of the potential benefits of an interdisciplinary research agenda that moves towards the theorisation of cisprivilege in security theory and practice.