Partielo |  Feminist Research Agendas

Definition

Critical feminism

(by contrast liberal feminism) considers the diverse structures of domination. It does not focus on the top (powerful women) but includes all women.

In Bananas, Beaches and Bases (1989) Cynthia Enloe asks a simple question : Where are women in international politics ?

The roles and positions of women in international politics remain therefore unquestioned.

Example of bananas : Bananas from latin america were first an exotic delicacy for affluent Americans (in the 1870s) but reached a larger market over the 20th century. The production of banana is mainly associated with male labour power and also strongly racialised.

The mechanization made the number of employed women grow but further more, as men worked in plantations, women (wives, mothers, sisters) had to take care of small farms at home. There were lots of discriminations against women-run farms.

As women have been increasingly hired in plantations they have also been increasingly active in labour unions.

At first, these unions weremale only. In 1985, Honduran women start organising, soon followed in all Latin American countries

They included new issues (the double day question), organised in workshops (for instance on female leadership), and managed to secure higher positions in the unions.

Now female organisations are well-settled at a local and transnational level and their voices start being heard at international forums.

Where are the women ?

Everywhere.

To study the women’s positions in international politics, we must abandon traditional distinctions between public and private, local and international.

The personal is political. The political is personal.

In her analysis, Enloe looks both at female representations (for instance Carmen Miranda, model for a brand) and women's material situations.

A retenir :

Other feminists have adopted a more post-modern agenda and focused on discourses. Remember how Said affirmed that the Orient was presented as feminine and how orientalists conceived of the relationship between the Occident and the Orient as a rapt/rape. In this example, no concrete women are involved. What is at stake is gender representations and the way they allow certain politics or behaviours. For instance, some IR scholars have worked on the rape of male soldiers to feminise them.