Feminism In International Society

Traditional international relations concern with relationship among different countries, nations, cultures and international organizations. Gender research is not the main stream of international research. International relations have long been considered to be irrelative to gender. The issues related to female have always been marginalized as “low politics” by scholars of international relations during its generating and developing historical process. Until 80 s of the 20 th century,international society developed into a new phase, especially after the Cold War, global governance and regional governance become new topic of international relation, it becomes lack of explanatory power for the mainstream of international relations theory especially by realism theory to many new phenomena and new problems. More and more minor theories come to stage to explain a wide range of more diversified international political phenomena. Meantime, feminism emerges as a critical theory.Feminism practice as well as theories. From the practical point of view, feminism,which usually goes together with women’s liberation movements, is a process to strive for all aspects of social rights for women in order to achieve the goal of gender equality. Two waves of the feminism movements have greatly promoted the rise of feminism and women’s liberation and provided feminism theory with practical foundation. From the theoretical perspective, feminism theory seeks to interpret international politics and the international community in the view of women or even beyond the gender. With “social gender” as its core concept, it forms the main schools based on the criticism against the mainstream theories, and guides feminism movement to a depth direction. This paper regards that feminism has much richer connotations: the objectives of feminism has shifted from obtaining absolute result fairness between men and women to obtaining opportunity and procedures fairness,from gaining physical gender fairness to gaining social gender fairness, from pursuingfemale social status to pursuing social harmony and world peace.Modern international society shows an obvious development trend: deepening national dependence pushes globalization, and globalization accelerated integration of international society while leading to spread of global natural and social problems.Severe global problems call for the world to strengthen communication and corporation, and require effective intervention of global citizens. Nations,international governmental organizations, especially the United Nations, and various international non-governmental organizations and transnational social movements,constitute the global governance system. The main bodies of feminism organizations that affect global social governance include the rising women national leaders in international politics, socially active women diplomats and first ladies on international diplomatic stages, continuously improving women organization and protection conventions, various flourishing non-governmental organization and women senior executive. Feminism influences effectiveness of global governance on difference levels from nations, the United Nations, international non-governmental organizations to international companies and transnational social movements. Women’s more participation and prominent effect in international affairs make that gender mainstreaming has become one of the important features of the contemporary international society development.Feminism theories directs feminism practice and improves international relationship discipline development. The most importance contribution of feminism is that it takes part in deconstructing mainstream international relations theories,especially neo-realism theory, and develops new international political subjects such as international political sociology. Within international relations discipline, the great ontological changes lead to international politics theories switch to sociology, which created international political sociology. Feminism theories have devoted to explain and read international politics from the unique social concept angle of social gender,and to study and analyze specific problems of international politics with sociology methods. Traditional feminism concerns most about social issues such as medicalcare, health, education, charity, and environmental protection. With the special gender characteristics of femininity, delicacy and apprehensiveness, women are suitable to work in non-governmental organizations, social movements and local communities.Women are good at resolving contradiction and conflicts with the ways of communication, compromise, mediation and corporation, which happens to coincide with international political sociology methodologies and provides innovative conditions for their study.In short, today’s international community is moving into an area of notably communicative rationality, soft international power, multidimensional international cooperation, and diverse global governance. This is a new era of re-emergence of feminism. Regardless of research on changing international society or rising-up feminism, the meaning of feminism on modern international political needs to be carefully unscrambled and predicted.