Theorical and practice resistances to the Feminist Methodology integration in International Relations
Keywords:
methodology, feminism, resistance, women, epistemology, power relationsCopyright (c) 2005 Monike NICOLÁS
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Abstract
The contributions of Feminism to International Relations are one of the most important sources of renewal of the current international theory, although these contributions have generated a series of resistances to the transversalizating feminist methodology in the discipline. This article discusses the reason of this resistance trying to answer five questions:
1. Why in all societies women are discriminated political, social and economically in relation to men? And, to which extent, unequal power relations between men and women are based both in the international system of states, as in the mechanisms contributing to the selective distribution of prosperity in the global economy?
2. Why feminism and feminist methodologies are presented in the framework of the discipline of International Relations (IR), as alternative, complementary, different, minor, or even higher perspectives, creating, in doing so, artificial hierarchies?
3. Why are the discussions recurrently focused on the self-justifications of such approaches on its theoretical consistency, and are barely focused in what it could mean for the renewal of International Relations, the transversal integration of gender analysis? This substantially differs from the mere aggregation of the contributions of feminism to the menu of the different theoretical approaches to discipline.
4. Why is this integration shown as a road yet to go? It is often said to be fragile, alternative, pending to be approved, exhausted in internal debates; without methodological tools, and devoid of enough legitimacy to become a transversal axis of the epistemological renewal of International Relations.
5. How is it possible to deny that feminist contributions, above its diversity of perspectives and approaches, identifies a central lack of the IR that distorts our understanding of the reality of the discipline?