The Feminist Challenge and Gender in Global Politics

1. The Feminist Challenge and Gender in Global Politics • Learning Objectives: • Understand how Feminists describe global politics, and why • Describe ways in which global politics is “gendered” • Explain the impact and relevance of Feminist and gendered concepts in global politics.

2. The Feminist Challenge and Gender in Global Politics • Core Principles • Feminism and Power • The Dominance of Liberal Feminism • Gender and Global Politics

3. Intellectual Origins • First Wave: • Mary Wollstonecraft; Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Susan B. Anthony • Second Wave • Betty Friedan; Cynthia Enloe • Third Wave • Rebecca Walker; Gayatri Spivak; Angela Davis; Chandra Mohanty; Carol Adams

4. Core Principles • Focus on gender: gender matters • Inequality of women • Marginalization of women in IR • Differences in female experience • Social relations are gendered • Question: where are the women?

5. Feminism and Power • Power is inseparable from gender relations • Criticism of Realism

6. The Dominance of Liberal Feminism • Liberal Feminism

7. The Liberal Feminist Program • Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979) • Optional Protocol to CEDAW (1999) • United Nations Commissioner on Women • United Nations Commission on Discrimination Against Women • UN Conference on Women (Beijing 1995) • Women’s NGOs

8. The Dominance of Liberal Feminism • Liberal Feminism • Socialist/Marxist Feminism • Postmodern Feminism • “Radical” Feminism

9. The Feminist Challenge and Gender in Global Politics • Women and war • Women and NGOs • Women and poverty • Women in development • Women and human rights • Women and work • Women and international health and education

10. Summary • After the class on Feminism, you should have a good understanding of how feminists describe global politics and the role of gender in that description. • You should be able to identify the feminist view of power and explain how this power is relevant in global politics. • You should be able to compare and contrast feminism with Liberalism, Realism, Marxism, and Postmodernism/Constructivism. • You should be able to explain the Liberal Feminist agenda, and the importance of the gendered perspective for global politics. • In the next unit of the course, we will examine decision-making in global politics.

11. And So… • No agreement on describing global politics and explaining why things happen (Realist and Liberal perspectives dominant) • Different views on nature of “the problem” • Different views on power • Policy flows from theory: differences on how to avoid war, achieve security, role of non-state actors, etc. • Theories are also analytical tools