About the Book
Two decades ago, V. Spike Peterson published a book titled Gendered States in which she asked, what difference does gender make in international relations and the construction of the sovereign state system? In the intervening years, a wealth of feminist scholarship has responded to her question, but in doing so, has looked past the nation state to consider the gendered dimensions of issues such as human rights, nationalist movements, development, and economic globalization. Moreover, since 2001, feminist international relations has also focused on international security, forging a new subfield of feminist security studies that revisits more traditional IR topics such as war and national security, albeit from very different perspectives.
With a preface by V. Spike Peterson, this book aims to connect the earlier debates of Peterson's book with the gendered state today, one that exists within a globalized and increasingly securitized world. Bringing together an international group of contributors from the Global South, United States, Europe, and Australia, this volume will answer three overarching questions. First, it will answer whether the concept of a "gendered state" is generic or if some states are particularly gendered in their identities and interests, and with what implications for the type of citizenship, society, and international security. Second, it will look at the continued theoretical significance of the gendered state for current IR scholarship. And, finally, it will explain to what extent postcolonial states are distinctive from metropolitan states with regard to gender. Including scholars from International Relations, Postcolonial Studies, and Development Studies, this volume collectively theorizes the modern state and its intricate relationship to security, identity politics, and gender.
Table of Contents:
Preface
-V. Spike Peterson
About the Contributors
1. Introduction: Feminist Imaginings of 21st Century Gendered States
-Swati Parashar, J. Ann Tickner, and Jacqui True
2. Rethinking the State in International Relations: A Personal Reflection
-J. Ann Tickner
3. Bringing Back Gendered States: Feminist Second Image Theorizing of International Relations
-Jacqui True
4. Manly States and Feminist Foreign Policy: Revisiting the Liberal State as an Agent of Change
-David Duriesmith
5. Rescuing the State? Sovereignty, Identity, and the Gendered Re-articulation of the State
-Christine Agius
6. Gendered State Assemblages and Temporary Labor Migration: The Case of Sri Lanka
-Samanthi J. Gunawardana
7. Mother Russia in Queer Peril: The Gender Logic of the Hypermasculine State
-Cai Wilkinson
8. A Global South State's Challenge to Gendered Global Cultures of Peacekeeping
-Lesley J. Pruitt
9. The Gendered State and the Emergence of a Post-conflict, Post-disaster Semi-autonomous Form of State (Aceh, Indonesia)
-Katrina Lee-Koo
10. The Postcolonial/Emotional State: Mother India's Response to Her Deviant Maoist Children
-Swati Parashar
11. Violence and Gender Politics in Forming the Proto-State "Islamic State"
-Katherine E. Brown
Afterwards
-Christine Sylvester
References
Index
About the Author :
Swati Parashar is Associate Professor in Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi in 2016. Her research engages with the intersections between feminism, security and postcolonialism, focused on conflict and development issues in South Asia. She is the author of Women and Militant Wars: The Politics of
Injury (Routledge: London, 2014) and of several books chapters and articles in journals such as Postcolonial Studies, Security Dialogue, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,
International Studies Review and International Studies Perspective.
J. Ann Tickner is Professor Emerita in the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California, and Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the School of International Service at American University. She is also Professor of Politics and International Relations at Monash University. Her principle areas of research include international theory, peace and security, and feminist approaches to international relations. Her publications include Gendering
World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War World and A Feminist Voyage Through International Relations.
Jacqui True is Professor of Politics & International Relations, and Director of Monash University's Centre for Gender, Peace and Security. She is also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. Her current research is focused on understanding the political economy of post-conflict violence against women and the patterns of systemic sexual and gender-based violence in Asia Pacific conflict-affected countries.
Her recent publications include The Political Economy of Violence Against Women and edited with Aida Hozic, Scandalous Economics: The Politics of Gender and Financial Crises.
Review :
"Revisiting Gendered States asks how gender relations have shaped changes in states over the last quarter century of global transformations, while continuing to normalize multiple inequalities and the insecurities that accompany them-a topic largely ignored by mainstream IR. These authors provide innovative and illuminating analyses and empirical research revealing the immense diversity in how states remain deeply gendered. They also point to effective
strategies to help move forward resistance to such conditions. Upper level undergraduates, graduate students and scholars in many disciplines will forever think differently about the constitution, practices
and meanings of states after reading these essays."
--Sandra Harding, author of Objectivity and Diversity
"This is an important and timely collection of great provocation. The imagination of international relations today is that the world is immersed in a conflict between the Westphalian state, seen as responsible and an expression of equality, and a loosely conjectured but fearsome Islamic state of terror and persecution. But this simple binary ignores a key feature of the Westphalian state, in both its older imperial and more recent postcolonial form - and that
is its intrinsic and indeed fearsome gendered nature of great inequality and obstruction to equity and humanity. This book, in its rich studies and analyses, makes us all rethink the value of today's
state and question a myriad assumptions upon which we have laboured to build senses of statehood that are exclusionary and, in value terms, corrupt."
--Stephen Chan, OBE, SOAS University of London
"In a period of nationalist and populist state based bombast, this book brings a clear-sighted gendered critique to the debate that is urgently needed. The chapters explore the unravelling of the nation state by global flows of capital and the rising anxieties of patriarchy rooted in the colonial hangover, the place of violence as well as of affect and emotion in the configuration of the masculinized narratives of the 'motherland' that stabilizes state power
even as marginalities are sedimented and new 'others' reproduced. This is an exciting and thought provoking book which should be essential reading for all those who are interested in the contemporary
modes of state formation and development."
--Shirin M Rai, author of The Gender Politics of Development
