My own pink world: Feminist diplomacy after culture

Abstract

What has happened to the ambitions of feminist diplomacy expressed a decade ago? Although feminist foreign policy is on the rise in the United States, and, globally, has scored important victories within multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, feminists seem to have scaled back earlier ambitions to save women everywhere from patriarchy. In the words of Barbie, they have retreated to their ‘own pink world.’ We argue that the seeds of current challenges go back more than a decade to feminist diplomacy’s own knowledge practices. The tactics that feminist diplomats at that time deployed to manage the feminist postmodern predicament – what we term the culture bog – can on one level be understood within the repertoire of technical moves that define diplomatic practice. Yet, in a deeper way, these tactics violated the ethos and commitments of both feminism and diplomacy. We diagnose in this work a failure to embrace the challenges and contradictions of bridging worlds of incompatible realities that gave both fields their vitality.