Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought: Recovery, Rejection, and Reconstitution

Abstract

Canons of intellectual “greats” anchor the history and scope of academic disciplines. Within international relations (IR), such a canon emerged in the mid-twentieth century and is almost entirely male. Why are women thinkers absent from IR’s canon? We show that it is not due to a lack of international thought, or that this thought fell outside established IR theories. Rather it is due to the gendered and racialized selection and reception of work that is deemed to be canonical. In contrast, we show what can be gained by reclaiming women’s international thought through analyses of three intellectuals whose work was authoritative and influential in its own time or today. Our findings question several of the basic premises underpinning IR’s existing canon and suggest the need for a new research agenda on women international thinkers as part of a fundamental rethinking of the history and scope of the discipline.

Notes from the Editors: A Bigger Pie

“…This bumper crop of prize-winning articles includes ones on traditional topics and subfields, such as the APSA Political Organizations and Parties section’s Jack Walker Award (Cirone, Cox, and Fiva 2021); the State Politics and Policy Best Journal Article Award (Gamm and Kousser 2021); and the Political Economy section’s Michael Wallerstein Award for the best-published article in political economy in a peer-reviewed journal (Baccini and Weymouth 2021). It also includes three articles about gender, including one that won the best article award from the Representation and Electoral Systems section (Betz, Fortunato, and O’Brien 2021); one that won the Political Communication section’s Walter Lippmann Best Published Article Award (Boussalis et al 2021); and one which won both the Best Article Award from the Foundations of Political Theory as well as the Okin-Young Award, given by three APSA units collaboratively, for an article on feminist political theory (Hutchings and Owens 2021).…”

Notes from the Editors

“…Under the previous editorial team, international relations comprised 5.9%. Not only have we published more articles from this subfield; we have also highlighted two by featuring them on our covers ("Women Thinkers and the Canon of International Thought," by Kimberly Hutchings and Patricia Owens [2021], and "Punishment and Politicization in the International Human Rights Regime," by Rochelle Terman and Joshua Byun [2022]). We also developed an International Women's Day virtual collection in 2021, guestcurated by Peace Medie, who included several articles on gender and conflict and one by Zehra Arat (2015) on feminism, women's rights, and the United Nations.…”

Race, class, gender and social entrepreneurship: extending the positionality of icons

“…Every academic discipline has a canon or set of important publications that marks its parameters and socializes new members in the field's curriculum (Hutchings and Owens, 2021). Canons may be understood as retrospectively legitimating a field's identity and narrative of origin (Pollock, 1999).…”

“…Revisiting debates on three-fold identity: gender, class and race Gender In the second half of the twentieth century, feminist scholars began to critique what they saw as the gendered mechanisms of canon formation; this critique stressed dichotomous standards used to rate whether male and female contributions were innovative along with a lack of consideration for female scholars who worked outside universities (Carroll, 1990;Silverberg, 1998). Feminist writers then attempted to show that absent these discriminatory criteria various late nineteenth and early twentieth century women met the scholarly requirements to have their work considered as part of the historical canon of their fields (Hutchings and Owens, 2021).…”