Commentary

Both of the essays under discussion here, Emily Rosenberg’s “ ‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War II” and Laura McEnaney’s “He-Men and Christian Mothers,” show the usefulness of analyzing gender relations when studying the cultural dynamics underlying and informing the formation of national and international U.S. policies. While Rosenberg’s essay emphasizes the ways in which gender discourses can redefine and restructure a dominant foreign policy aligned with the state, McEnaney’s essay shows how these same discourses can be used as a basis for responding to and reconfiguring those dominant policies in ways that subvert them. Both essays indicate the complex interrelationships that exist between gender and U.S. national policies. Because the subject of this forum is culture and foreign policy, with a special emphasis on gender, it might seem most direct to discuss the ways in which cultural analyses can inform interpretations of foreign policy. But because so much of U.S. dominant culture and, most specifically, U.S. foreign policy is constructed in and through structures and symbols of gender, it is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss cultural discourses without discussing gender. It is certainly true that gender structures neither exhaust nor define U.S. dominant culture, a culture that has been shaped by and enacted through discourses of racial, sexual, ethnic, regional, class, and generational differences. At any specific historical moment, these structures of difference, as both of the essays show, have unequal trajectories of force and meaning and consequently varying patterns of interrelationships. In other words, discourses of race may dominate cultural narratives at a particular moment in such a way that discourses of age, region, religion, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender will be read through and in relation to the constructed patterns of racial difference. Such would be the case, for example, in late-nineteenth-century England, where science, linguistics, and empire employed narratives of racial difference to structure family relations, national hierarchies, and economic policies. I would argue, however, that there has been no period, especially in the determination of U.S. foreign policy, when gender has not been a factor. On the contrary, in many cases it has been the primary factor for the construction of national meaning

Aesthetics · Foreign policy · Identity (music · National identity · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Gender Studies · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Law · Philosophy · Public Administration

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