Feminist Thinking In International Relations

For a long time, IRs(International Relations) theories have regarded state as the principal agent and the smallest behavior unit in the international society. Naturally national activities not individual behaviors are the emphasis in IRs study. As a result, less issues of IRs have involved human individuals. In this sense, IRs theory has long been believed gender-neutral or having nothing to do with gender. However, such situation has changed since the intervention of feminist thoughts.In the late 1980s, feminist scholars introduced gender, as an analytic approach, into the study of IRs. Through the perspective of gender, feminist found out that traditional theories were not gender-neutral but gender-biased. Feminist writers generally agree that men have held leading positions of authority, leadership, and power, such as government officials, foreign-policy makers and military commanders, etc, while the role of women has been confined to the subordinate place, providing the supporting service. It is the case whether in international political activities or academic field, men have overwhelming advantage over women. The field of IRs is a world of male-dominated, its theory featuring a pronounced masculine bias with regard to methods, research priority, goals and findings. On the contrary, all those related to women are underestimated and even ignored. Feminists believe that traditional IRs knowledge can not be complete if it dose not derive from multiple sources of masculine and feminist perspectives on the basic questions, thus, as feminist logic argues, the existing male-dominated IRs theory is inadequate, probably misleading readers.The thesis contains six sections.The first section mainly describes the emergence background of feminist thoughts and their later development. Feminist thoughts of IRs first appeared in the late 60s and early 70s of 20th, attributed to drastic changes in the international system, international women movements, and feminist academic achievements as well. Although the development of feminist thoughts is full of challenges, they have made exciting progress. Also they have displayed the qualities of compatibility and vitality through being accepted gradually, though rejected strongly at first.The second section mainly introduces the major strands of feminist thoughts. According to their political tendency, feminist thoughts have four types. In time order, they are liberal, socialist, radical and post-modernism . Besides, there are non-major ones, such as cultural, the third-world, post-colonialism and ecological feminist.In the third section, the author analyzes the core conceptions and notions of feminist thoughts. While feminist scholarship challenged the implicitly gendered foundations of mainstream IR, it presented its own notions and ideas based on gender. For example, feminist researchers redefined the conception of power as empowerment rather than power over, and replaced the conception of"security dilemma"with the conception"security for human beings". At the same time, feminists also presented more open conception of"empathetic cooperation"as well as the notion of"the personal is international", etc. All these gender-based conceptions and theoretical modes represented an important supplement, if not alternative, to realist theories, facilitating the resolution of human common problems in the challenging, complex, and heterogeneous international societies.In the fourth section, the author discusses the relationship between feminists and mainstream IRs. In the course of querying and criticizing traditional theories, realist theory in particular, feminists have established various linkages with other theories. For realist theories, feminists have made a strong attack upon them, including their philosophical foundations of human nature, power theory, the concept of state-centricity and the idea of zero-sum security, etc. Unlike realist theories, neo-liberalist shares some ideas with feminists. To the extent that gender roles have been socially constructed, feminists have close relationship with constructivism theory.The fifth section explores the achievements, the limitations of feminist thoughts, and predicts their promising future. With the appearance and growth of the feminist thoughts, the conception of gender was introduced into the IR field. Through the perspective of gender, feminist found out there are many phenomena of discrimination against women. Feminist scholars have done much, trying to devise gender bias among the traditional theories. Meanwhile, they also incorporated some issues ignored before in the IR study. However, feminists, in themselves, exposed their limitations. For example, for feminist theories, both theoretical systematic quality and completeness are not sufficient. When feminist researchers applied gender theory to study realistic issues, they encountered many challenges, involved in dilemma either epistemologically or methodologically from time to time. Nevertheless, benefited from its characteristic of super-compability and diversity, feminist IRs thoughts would improve constantly, and become more and more rational and complete.In the last section, the author briefly discusses the influence of feminist thoughts on China and Chinese women, and puts forward ideas on the construction of Chinese feminist IRs theory. Although it has been nearly a decade since feminist thoughts were introduced into China, feminist thoughts have already drawn wide attention in the circle of Chinese IRs. Chinese feminist scholars in IRs are working hard to explore and adopt reasonable components of western feminists, combining with specialities of Chinese society and women movements, to construct Chinese feminist IRs theory.