Feminist Scholarship in International Relations and the Politics of Disciplinary Emotion

Abstract

The article engages with the relationship between feminist scholarship and the discipline of International Relations. Taking a step back from the recurrent concerns with marginality and those with the absent feminist revolution in IR, we recast the problem of the complicated ménage between feminism and the fi eld of IR as a case of a failure to love. Drawing on the sociology of thinking of Randall Collins and his theory of interaction ritual chains, we read the logic of practice in intellectual fi elds as one rooted in emotion. In this framework, we theorize citation practices as bearing the trace of intellectuals' emotionloaded coalitions of the mind. The article maps out the intellectual coalitions in IR with respect to the feminist question by reconstructing the citation networks emerging from the special issue of Millennium, published in 1988 on 'Women in IR'. The maps we put together are read as snapshots of the emotional economy of IR, allowing further refl ection about the status of feminist scholarship in IR, about intellectual creativity and about change and stasis in our discipline. We conclude that it is IR which is in trouble, not feminists, with regard to creative potential. Feminists are not marginal in or to IR; instead they are part of a ring of creativity connecting the emotional energies of different disciplinary fi elds.

Dividing Discipline: Structures of Communication in International Relations

“…Journal citations constitute a complex network, and the citation network approach has recently been applied to subfields of IR such as conflict studies (Sillanpää and Koivula 2010), security studies (Russett and Arnold 2010), or approaches such as feminism (Soreanu and Hudson 2008) but not to the IR discipline itself. Indeed, IR communication may be too fragmented to be studied in total, yet such fragmentation, specialization, and division should be subject to empirical investigation, not assumed a priori.…”

Feminist Creativities and the Disciplinary Imaginary of International Relations1

“…The acuteness of this specter of emancipation actually conveys the dilemmatic condition of feminism, which silently encapsulates the dilemmatic condition of the twenty-first-century intellectual. This dilemma is substantiated by the tension between practicing some form of political commitment, which is an act of inherently essentialist nature, on the one hand, and experimenting with some version of a nonessentialist ⁄ constructivist view of the world, on the other hand (Soreanu and Hudson 2008). The committed exploration of creative solutions for this tension is the core reconstructive resource that feminism has for the discipline of International Relations.…”

“…Although the term “mainstream” is less popular in IR than it is in sociology, the idea of an orthodoxy is equally present, but manifested in a different canonical form, as we have previously seen. It is here that feminists work as innovators; they are implicated in locally fighting this conflation of cohesion and this core–periphery polarity by refusing to take up the position of marginality and also by showing preoccupation for alternative spaces: spaces of recirculation of rhetoric, spaces of incestuous seductions, spaces of illegitimate conceptual possessions and de‐possessions, spaces of practicing false selves, and spaces of setting up a mainstream within the subaltern (Soreanu and Hudson 2008). Feminists are both austere and critical in reports on their unproblematic cognitive ties.…”

The networks and niches of international political economy

“…Moreover, we analyze trends not only in published scholarship but also in teaching (through analysis of IPE syllabi) and through organs of professional socialization such as conference participation. There have been a few studies of citation patterns in IR scholarship, but none 290 on the scale conducted in this paper (Maliniak, Oakes, Peterson and Tierney 2011;Soreanu and Hudson 2008).…”