Understanding International Relations, Third Edition

particular on the work of Paul Virilio – one of the only writers referred to in
this section who could accurately be described as postmodernist, in so far his
oeuvre suggests that the pace of contemporary existence (in every sense of
the term) is actually taking us beyond the modern into a new era (Der Derian
1987, 1992, 1998, 2001). Der Derian’s work on ‘virtual war’ has interesting
connections with other attempts to trace the changing nature of warfare, and
will be discussed briefly below, in Chapter 6.
There is no particular reason why feminist writings should be associated
with poststructuralism as opposed to the other positions outlined in this
chapter – and, indeed, one of the most influential of feminist writers on IR,
Jean Bethke Elshtain, whose work on war and the public/private divide is
discussed in Chapter 6, certainly could not be described in these terms
(Elshtain 1987, 1998). Nonetheless, the majority of feminist writers in the
field do fall naturally into this section rather than, say the constructivist or
critical theoretical section. The central point here is that the voice of the
European Enlightenment is seen as masculine, and feminist writers such as
Christine Sylvester (1994, 2001), J. Ann Tickner (1992, 2001), Cynthia
Enloe (1993, 2000, 2004) and Cynthia Weber (1999) are not prepared to
see the association of ‘European, rationalist and male’ as contingent (in the
way that, for example, a liberal feminist simply concerned with ‘women’s
equality’ might). These writers share with the other authors discussed above
the view that the project of emancipation of the Enlightenment is not recov-
erable by, in this case, simply adding women to the equation. Instead they
attempt, in various ways, to develop accounts of the social world that trace
the influence of gender in all our categories, most particularly, of course, in
this context, in our notions of the ‘international’.
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As with the other writers in this section, the goal is to dislocate our sense
of what is ‘normal’, to cause us to re-think assumptions that we did not even
know were assumptions. Tickner and Enloe engage in this project in ways
which ultimately connect back to the wider goals of critical theory and an
expanded, revised notion of human emancipation. Other writers have no
such ambition. Perhaps the most striking and controversial piece of writing
in the latter camp is Cynthia Weber’s account of US policy towards the
Caribbean and Central America over the last generation in terms of the
projection of fears of castration created by the survival of Castro’s regime in
Cuba (1999). This particular example of feminist IR writing is by no means
typical, but the forging of links with another substantial body of contempo-
rary social theory – in this case, gender studies and so-called ‘queer theory’ –
certainly illustrates the general ambition of post-positivist IR to break away
from the statist assumptions characteristic of mainstream theory.