Feminist Creativities and the Disciplinary Imaginary of International Relations1

Abstract

Ever since feminist voices started to be heard in the field of International Relations (IR) more than two decades ago, the discipline has undergone important changes. These changes unfold at the level of the disciplinary imaginary, which means that our accounts of the legitimate units in the organization of knowledge are unsettled and the center–periphery topography of the discipline is reconfigured. By reflecting on the case of feminist knowledge production in IR, I propose a rethinking of the encounter orthodoxy‐meets‐heterodoxy, which allows us to conceive of heterodoxy as an active part, one that does and is not only being done. Ultimately, this contributes to the understanding of the creation of novelty in contemporary intellectual fields, and it recovers feminists in IR as reflexive artisans devising local modes of subversive action.

Why is there no Queer International Theory?

“…While there are certainly institutional and national variations in how these standards are enacted (Hoffmann, 1977;Waever, 1998), most IR academics are required to justify their work with regard to these standards at some point in their careers. Disciplinary IR's commitments and standards are as much the performative result of so-called "mainstream" agendas of learned societies, universities, independent funding agencies and governments that support socially, culturally, economically, or politically "policy-relevance", "usefulness" or "impactful" research as they are the performative outcome of so-called "dissident" practices (Ashley and Walker, 1990; also see Soreanu, 2010) that seek to rewrite, resist or rebel against socalled mainstream agendas, be they "scientific", "positivist", or "neoliberal", for example. Together, these intricately intertwined positions produce a Disciplinary IR that claims to speak for the whole of the discipline of IR because it wields sufficient 6 power to (de)legitimate IR scholars and their work for many user communities.…”

How is rape a weapon of war? Feminist International Relations, modes of critical explanation and the study of wartime sexual violence

“…Instead, we should look to the kinds of research questions asked , the ways in which the answers are variably constructed and the emancipatory political commitments built into them. There are manifest and latent stories about what feminist analysis does (Soreanu, 2010: 383), just as there are manifest and latent stories about how feminism takes on and transforms categories inherited from elsewhere (Harding, 1986; Wiegman, 2002). Further, as Mary Caprioli argues (2004: 256–257), there is a real risk of feminism being seen — by both proponents and detractors — through the Popperian ‘Myth of the Framework’, where it is assumed that real differences in approaches are projected ‘all the way down’, such that there can be no commonality or communication with paradigmatic others.…”

The Queer Art of Failed IR?

“…They are more often than not the product of gender, sex, race, sexuality, national origin, education, and employment privilege that produce a narrow view of what is and what should be, based on the practices that have provided the success from which the privileged writer writes. As Weber (2014b, p. 29) argues, “disciplinary IR’s commitments and standards are as much the performative result of the so-called ‘mainstream’ agendas of learned societies, universities, independent funding agencies, and governments … as they are the performative outcome of so-called ‘dissident’ practices” (citing Ashley & Walker, 1990; Soreanu, 2010). In fact, Weber suggests that the radical critical edge of IR and its mainstream “foes” are really “intricately intertwined positions” which “produce a disciplinary IR that claims to speak for the whole of the discipline” out of power rather than legitimacy (Weber, 2014b, p. 29).…”