Flick of the Skirt

A Feminist Challenge to IR's Coherent Narrative

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2236779
AutoresCynthia Enloe (Clark University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2016
Volumen10
Número4
Páginas320-331
Fecha de publicación2016-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Political Sociology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ips/olw017
OpenAlexW2565129339
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas11

Marriage is rarely accorded analytical attention by International Relations (IR) scholars. By contrast, feminist interrogators of marriage—as an institution and the site of lived experience—have exposed the reliance of militarists and militaries, and thus the conduct of international politics, on sustaining patriarchal marriage. By international political sociology taking those feminist interrogations seriously, we will be able to comprehend the significance of typically trivialized signals and gestures that otherwise fall through the nets of conventional international political analysis. “Military wives” (in all their national, racialized, and status diversity) prove worthy of serious international sociological attention. No military base, local or overseas, can be adequately understood without such attention. Attentiveness to gendered quotidian militarizing dynamics, in turn, will transform the IR narrative. “China’s current building of atoll bases in the South China Sea is escalating the militarization of the entire region.” The analytical assertion rolls easily off the conventional international politics expert’s tongue and is absorbed just as easily in the ears of most conventional listeners.

Assertion · China · Institution · International relations · Militarization · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Law