Is International Politics a Gendered Realm - Assignment Example

Is international politics a gendered realm? Introduction: In recent academic research it has become almost a routine to observe international politics portrayed as “socially constructed”. Illustrating on a range of social hypotheses- critical hypothesis, postmodernism, feminist hypothesis, chronological institutionalism, sociological institutionalism, emblematic interactionism and the like- learners of international politics have progressively acknowledged two basic doctrines of “constructivism” (i). Mainly shared thoughts rather than matter forces resolve the frameworks of human relationship, and (ii) these create the individualities and significance of purposive performers shared thoughts rather provided by nature. The first symbolizes an “idealist method” to communal life and its importance on the sharing of the thoughts. The second is a “holist” or “structuralist” method on account of its highlighting of the evolving powers of communal structures which combats the “individualist” outlook that communal structures are reducible to persons or individual level. Constructivism could consequently be viewed as a sort of “structural idealism” (Wendt, 1999, p. 1). The global framework also plays a role in determining gender politics nationally, through the broadcast of political reasons by way of international social movements; the expression of political and human rights principles in global governance forums; the declaration of global justice values concerning migration, wedding, labor and the like; and the rivalry of political blocs globally, such as the one that controlled international politics at some stage in the Cold War (Ritter, 2006, p. 3). What is the position of the women? Gender is a group of difference and a means of allocating power in international society. Global discussions and global institutions are filled with buildings that enable gender inequality. For instance, neoliberal economics and the Breton Wood organizations build economic mediators as genderless, concealing women’s care work and their work in the house, and instilling government strategies and the practices of companies with unrelenting gender biases. Such prejudices coexist awkwardly with international rules on gender parity that have been institutionalized since the early 20th century. These systematize women’s equivalent rights to nationality, identical access to education, equivalent pay and treatment in the place of work, and protection against violence. (Prugl, 2004, p. 69) The year 1920 brought with it a milestone progress in the women’s rights movement: permitting women the right to take part in an election in the United States. However, although it has been over eighty years since women have no longer been officially prohibited from the politics of this country, there are however at present few extraordinary women of high political stature. This is why such a common question inquired by feminists in the sphere of international politics is “where are the women?” that is, why is it that women are so exceptional in the political domain, and also that political discussions generally tend to eliminate them (Gambier, n.d, p. 1). In seeking to correct this condition, one must think the aforementioned query has being inquired from multiple viewpoints: is there an inborn trait in women that makes them either improper or unwilling to be political performers, or is this political submissiveness socially accepted by or imposed upon them, or is it some unification? International associations’ critic Jan Jindy Pettman challenges that there is a difference between sex and gender. Sex is viewed in terms of biology: we are born male or female, whereas gender is a social structure and implies what it means to be male or female in any specific place and time. There are other feminists who challenge, from a biological standpoint, that mannerisms such as political interest and potential are actually genetic traits, and thus women are biologically inclined to remain mainly in the private domain (Gambier, n.d, p. 2). Matt Ridley declares that personality too is inherited. A relevant example becomes visible in the American Political Science Association journal, which claims the heritability of political principles. If this is true, that political approaches have genetic causes, then this could imply that political indifference is also genetic in nature. This would thus validate the debate that there is a biological inclination for women to withdraw from political professions. However, the critical error in the supposition that personality is purely natural is that biology is influenced and altered by environment, that is, by communal forces (Gambier, n.d., p. 3). Ridley asserts that the purpose of genes is to take out certain types of information from the rearing and surroundings of landlord organism. Therefore, there is not an intrinsic genetic feature in women that makes them reluctant or unable to be political. It is rather that their genes react to the communal forces of their surroundings because the political realm especially is gendered and rules out women. The reason for the lack of women in politics have been instituted as communally induced, it must be inspected how these communal factors, the structure of gender and above all the gendering of politics, function to downgrade women to the private domain (Gambier, n.d., p.4). In fact, public existence is often in direct disagreement with the idealized femininity, which admires nurturing, and motherliness, pacifism, love and obedience. The traits that are observed as precious to be a political actor, however, such as violence, reasonableness, power, and leadership, challenge idealized femininity to a certain degree. Furthermore, even when a woman does take action in public life, she must be masculinized in order to do so. In short, to belong to the feminine gender is to be apolitical; once one turns out to be political, and penetrates into the public domain, she perpetually must become masculine. Not only are women themselves, by the descriptions of femininity, restricted to the personal life of the home, but political activities and discussions themselves are framed so as to keep women, if not totally absent, but practically on the edges of the realm of political authority. The adoration of war and military act is a primary instance of political performances, which are framed to rule out women. This method of structuring femininity as identical with passivity is also viewed in the feminization of the country. Another technique in which the feminine is built as unreceptive is the relationship of femininity with tranquility (Gambier, n.d., p. 5). Pettman is eager not to depict women simply as sufferers. She believes women's role traditionally and globally in movements for tranquility, noting the ways in which the matter of tranquility tends to aggravate dissimilarities between feminists. Where some feminists view women as inherently more nonviolent than men, others refuse this and disagree as a substitute for equal rights between men and women in the military. Others still both combat an idea of women's tendency to peace, and at the same time combat militarism, and consequently women's participation in it. The argument about women in conflict has, as much as anything else emphasized the continuing tear within feminism between longings for gender equality, and craving for respecting gender disparity. Pettman, characteristically, focuses on describing arguments more than interfering in them, but does combat the idea of women as unavoidably more peaceful than men (Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics Jan Jindy Pettman, n.d.). According to J. Ann Tickner, the relationship of femininity with tranquility provides support to an idealized masculinity that relies on constructing women as unreceptive victims in need of defense. He also claims that women are inexperienced in subjects relating to international politics. The degree of the marginalization of women from the political ground persists, from the imprisonment of women to the private domain by the fundamental character of the feminized gender, to the omission of women from political tasks by the gendering of political activities and discussions, to the disregarding of women in total where political activities and discussions occur (Gambier, n.d., p. 6). Even when actions are taken purposefully for women, these activities still differentiate women’s rights as being detached from human rights, and still downgrade women to the private domain. Thus women are, by communal structure, kept out or marginalized from political activity, and the public sphere in common, on multiple fronts. The fact that this is recognized by women can probably be accredited to the aforementioned biological feature of personality that the genetic materials that would cause women to be or longing to be political performers have merely not been activated, in reaction to the communal factors that provide them no need to commence (Gambier, n.d., p.7). Gender and community: The concept of civil community functioned as political underlying principle in ways very related to White’s explanation of an idealized counter-reflection, a personification of communal virtue dealing with political vice: the realm of liberty versus the realm of compulsion, of involvement versus hierarchy, pluralism versus conventionality, impulsiveness versus manipulation, purity versus dishonesty. (Mwambuli, n.d.) As White debates, these political belongings may be operative from the standpoint of activism, but conceals a range of deliberations about associations of power within civil community, and of the specific abilities of civil community to achieve the autonomous and developmental principles, which escort its rhetoric. Even at the broadest stages of explanation, feminists have analyzed the notion of civil community because it is pronounced on the theoretical distinction between the public and the private areas. This distinction is observed as having an exclusionary effect for women; both in terms of the means in which the political and civil societies are defined as well as in the realistic effects it has for the involvement of women in the public field. Both types of segregation – the constitutive and the realistic - conceal women’s organization as citizens, the former by restricting the meaning of the political and the latter by aborting to address systematic obstructions to women’s involvement. The dissimilarity between public and private divisions in community has also been condemned for its exclusive impact in terms of involvement in the public dominion. This impact can be observed at different phases. Firstly, feminists have debated that analyzing the public sphere as the sphere of free equivalents, separate from the inequalities of the private field, does not detain the reality that women’s uneven position within the family institutes the limitations of their public involvement. Despite maintaining the parity of individuals in the political dominion, idealized concepts of civil society can hide the economic and other social dissimilarities that restrain political participation. Civil society is often considered as a structure of individualism against the private space of the relatives. Far from being separate spheres of human action, however, Pateman has disagreed that the limitations on women’s mobility and contractual authorities, as well as ideological suppositions about suitable women’s roles, have a direct effect on their public potentials. Although all inhabitants may have the right to take part, women‘s private accountabilities and communal stereotyping of women’s public tasks which crop up from these make it complicated for women to take part as equals in the public domain. Reproductive rights are the very roots of the opportunity of effective contribution in both civil community and the polity. Although women can be viewed as being hindered in terms of their political involvement in the same manners as other marginal communal groups (for example, rural individuals, poor individuals, etc.), reproductive accountabilities and the division of labor in community act as particular gendered limits. The impact is to constrict the scope for women’s involvement in formal politics and in civil community (Mwambuli, n.d). Kandiyoti disagrees and manages to “exert a powerful influence on the shaping of women's gendered subjectivity and determine the nature of gender ideology in different contexts…they also influence both the potential for and specific forms of women's active or passive resistance in the face of their oppression (Reconstructing Gender and Activism, n.d., p. 14). Analyzing democratization arguments from a gender viewpoint, Georgina Waylen has demonstrated that conventional views of democratization leave out women. At a constitutive stage, this omission arises from a constricted view of politics as an elite-driven practice. Evaluations of democratization, which center simply on the high politics in effect value only male-subjugated politics – women’s task as political agents is downplayed since their domains of political action are not seen as important. This has insinuations for the way democracy itself is envisaged, for it is narrowly restricted to an institutional agreement to create a legitimate leadership. Issues of communal and economic equality are disconnected from that of political parity. The outcomes of democratization are eliminated from analysis. As a result gender concerns ahead of formal parity, such as issues about the redeployment of authority, are marginalized (Mwambuli, n.d). Is international politics a gendered kingdom? Gender uniqueness and dissimilarity is a challenged, undermined, queried and influenced creation, the realms of which are applied to validate, explicate and strengthen conventional and normalized methods to international politics and hypotheses of international relations. In reaction to this, feminist authors especially, have sought to look at the imbalanced gender associations present in the interstate structure, and evaluate the insinuations of the truth that the majority of the civic world of the state and its global politics has been set aside for men. However, gender theorists have not only confronted the outset of femininity and its task or application in the political ground, but have also recognized and addressed the variety of ideas about maleness and the dispensing of certain kinds of masculinity in modern politics. Therefore, to an escalating body of novelists, gender is recognized as a basic consideration in the ontological and normative structure of International Relations (I.R.) theory, a deliberation that was, and remains largely overlooked by the discipline (Contributions to gender theorists to International Relations, 2009, p. 1). However, the liberalist, mainly economic viewpoint conspires to categorize gender issues as individual oriented compared to those of autonomy, authority and state. Paying notice to women and gender creates a debate that looks to shift certain issues (human rights, scarcity, relocation, and healthcare) beyond the realms of marginal deliberation to a new archetype in which the epistemological and ontological base of conventional I.R theory is confronted, and restored with a normative structure that not only recognizes where the women are, but also why they and feminized men are exposed to an unfairness of power associations. Gender theorists can, thus, be conceded as having challenged the normative postulations underpinning the pragmatist - neo liberal argument (Contributions to gender theorists to International Relations, 2009, p. 2). The significance of language as a strengthening of norms connects back to the hypothesis of gender as a social building - vital in that it is division of society’s steady influence, capable to submerge children in, and absorb them with, recognized norms. As Tickner and Fukuyama's debate highlighted, and as research into language demonstrates, there is a insight of maleness as sadistic and aggressive, and femaleness as peace adoring and appeasing, that notifies much of I.R's theoretical suppositions (Contributions to gender theorists to International Relations, 2009, p. 3). Feminists have inspected extensively the level to which typical concepts of safety in the field have been conventionally constrained by masculine indicators, failing to embrace security issues women tackle every day that are, linked with their uneven or subjugated conditions of survival with respect to men, for instance, domestic aggression (Youngs, n.d, p. 83). It can be understood that not only has gender and feminist hypothesis confronted realist and liberalist thoughts, it has also developed the realms of what is believed to be pertinent to I.R study ahead of military, economic and even human rights considerations. Taking gender seriously has led to a necessary assessment of the language, roles and rites involved in scholastic attempt itself (Contributions to gender theorists to International Relations, 2009, p. 4-5). There is, in addition to the ontology of uniqueness, a proclivity to atomize individuality that has the outcome of neglecting other apprehensions such as those of supremacy relations. However, in spite of some of the alterations of emphasis that can obstruct it, gender hypothesis has unquestionably contributed to the capability of International Relations as a restraint to produce a more comprehensive consideration of gender, and recognition of its significance in politics and world affairs (Contributions to gender theorists to International Relations, 2009, p. 6). Conclusion: Neo-liberal institutionalism acknowledged neo-realism that international hypothesis should start with egotistical nations which communicate with one another in an anarchical situation (Linklater, 2000, p. 9). Thus, different theories have different views, which become very hard to single out and choose which theory is better. The manipulation of scholastic scribblers on practitioners is no less apparent in international associations than in economics. Yet there is a gaping partition between practitioners and philosophers of international associations. Despite the apparent effect of philosophers on their thoughts and acts, practitioners are all too frequently predisposed to release the work of philosophers as "scholastic" (Ross, 1999). Politics is evaluated in terms of achievement or failure, not of good or evil, of just or unjust, of impartiality or partiality. In short, it is reviewed in ideological, not ethical, terms. Yet, even though the conclusion perpetually reached is that any ethical judgment in politics is indemonstrable, the argument on the ethics of domestic politics has known practically no respite (Bonanate, 1995, p. 6). Genetics simply reproduce reactions to environmental issues; women are fundamentally reliant on the communal forces that form gender, insofar as their prospective to hold a political profession is concerned, as the structure is essentially heaped completely against them. However, this is often not an apprehension of women, in that since they are genetically inclined, due to the communal construct of gender, to merely have no concern to do so. The only system for women to overcome this is to comprehend that several general issues faced by women must be tackled in terms of the international formations underlying them (Gambier, n.d., p. 8-9). Women, as a gendered group, are formed by power, but simultaneously women as associates of dissimilar class-power formations are vehicles of authority (Reconstructing Gender and Activism, n.d., p. 18). References: 1. Bonanate, L, 1995. Ethics and international politics. Studies in international relations (Columbia, S.C.) Studies in International Relations. Studies in international relations (University of South Carolina Press). Univ of South Carolina Press (South Carolina). 2. “Contributions to gender theorists to International Relations.”, July 5, 2009. Available at: http://www.e-ir.info/?p=1144&article2pdf=1. (Accessed on Aug. 25, 2009). 3. Gambier, L, n.d. “Where are the women”. Available at: http://www.hws.edu/academics/ctl/pdf/gambier_crenner.pdf (Accessed on Sept. 1, 2009). 4. Linklater, A., 2000. International relations: critical concepts in political science Critical concepts in political science International Relations: Critical Concepts in Political Science, Andrew Linklater, ISBN 0415201373, 9780415201377 Volume 1 of International Relations, Andrew Linklater, ISBN 0415201373, 9780415201377. Taylor & Francis (New York). 5. Mwambuli, S., n.d. “Gender and Civil Society”. Available at: http://www.istr.org/conferences/barcelona/cd/pdf/abstracts/Mwambuli.Sekelaga.pdf (Accessed on Sept. 1, 2009). 6. Prugl, E, Winter/ Spring 2004. “International Institutions and Feminist Politics”. Brown Journal of World Affairs. Vol. X., Iss. 2. Available at: http://www.watsoninstitute.org/bjwa/archive/10.2/Feminist%20Theory/Prugl.pdf (Accessed on Aug. 25, 2009). 7. “Reconstructing Gender and Activism”, n.d. Available at: http://www.focusanthro.org/archive/2007-2008/sajadian07-08.pdf. (Accessed on Aug. 25, 2009). 8. Ritter, G, May 2006. “Gender as a Category of Analysis in American Political Development” Available at: http://americandemocracy.nd.edu/assets/11300/ritter_conference.pdf (Accessed on Sept. 1, 2009). 9. Ross, A.L., Spring 1999. “International Relations: Theory and Practice”. Available at: http://pawss.hampshire.edu/faculty/curriculum/pdf/war_ross.pdf (Accessed on Aug. 25, 2009). 10. Wendt, A., 1999. “Social Theory of International Politics”. CUP (Cambridge). Available at: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/samples/cam032/98048329.pdf (Accessed on Aug. 24, 2009). 11. “Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics Jan Jindy Pettman”, n.d. Australian Humanities Review. Available at: http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-Dec-1996/curthoys.html (Accessed on Aug. 25, 2009). 12. Youngs, G., n.d. “Feminist International Relations: a contradiction in terms? Or: why women and gender are essential to understanding the world ‘we’ live in.” Available at: http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~courses/PoliticalScience/661B1/documents/GillianYoungsFeministIRContradictionOr.pdf (Accessed on Aug. 25, 2009). Read More