Gender and International Relations

Editor's Note: R. CharliCarpenter's (2002)essay review titled “Gender Theory in World Politics: Contributions of a Non-Feminist Standpoint?” in a recent issue of the International Studies Review (ISR) was bound to spark debate. The title was well chosen and instantly provocative. Many readers would assume that gender is a synonym for women, that those concerned with gender would be women, and that they would perforce be feminists. How, then, could there be a “non-feminist” view of gender and, from such a perspective, what could gender possibly be? Moreover, feminism in international relations (IR)—whether or not coincident with “feminist IR”—has itself been controversial from the beginning. The intense mix of political, methodological, and substantive debates that has resulted has led to productive relationships between IR and other disciplines, inward migrations into IR of scholars anxious to engage with international politics, and intellectually exciting rethinking within IR and its subfields. The...