Introduction
Q: How many radical feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Thirteen. One to change the bulb and twelve to argue over the definition of ‘radical feminist’.
Robin MorganFootnote 1A spectre is haunting feminist International Relations (IR) – in the form of radical feminism. Its core concepts and critiques lurk throughout feminist IR, but we find direct engagement with radical feminism curiously absent in the scholarship. In this article, we explore the absence of radical feminist theory within feminist IR, the effects this has had on how feminist IR has theorised concepts that are central to its development, and attempt to sketch what might be gained by revisiting radical feminist theory for thinking through issues of the international. In forwarding this argument, we echo Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern's insight that feminist IR has rarely provided sustained critical engagement with the earlier feminist theoretical debates that inform current scholarship on ideas such as sexuality, violence, and power.Footnote 2 Echoing debates across the discipline regarding the representation of and depth of engagement with the ‘old’ theories from which the discipline developed,Footnote 3 we call attention to what is lost from the death of radical feminist thought in disciplinary IR and call on feminists in IR to revisit radical feminist theory, not as a corrective to current conceptualisations of the international, but as a means for maintaining the robustness and diversity of feminist praxis in international relations.
Feminist IR owes a great deal to radical feminist theory, beginning with its basic premise that the daily lived experiences of women around the world are of ontological and epistemological significance to the study of the international.Footnote 4 Surveys of feminist IR theory commonly begin with Cynthia Enloe's evocative claim that the personal is international.Footnote 5 This rallying cry of feminist international thought expands on the radical feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’, which originated within second-wave feminist agitation for a more serious consideration of women's embodied experiences as a basis for political analysis and engagement.Footnote 6 Thus, the fundamental notion that relations between the sexes are political provides the starting point for feminist IR to analyse both women's participation within and marginalisation from the ‘high politics’ of IR as based within structural relations of disparate power between men and women, which obfuscates not only where women are in international politics, but also what effects the doing of politics at the international level has on the lived experiences of those outside the halls of power.
Since the late 1980s, feminist IR has gained significant traction in the discipline. Nearly all IR textbooks and most IR theory courses now include at least a cursory survey of feminist contributions to the field. And while earlier surveys may have presented gender and women as an ‘issue’ of the field,Footnote 7 increasingly feminist IR is represented as a theoretical lens for the study of international politics,Footnote 8 particularly its ‘structures and processes’.Footnote 9 Categorising feminist IR theory has proven challenging, however. Although initial surveys represented feminist IR scholarship as falling into one of three ideologies: liberal, radical, or poststructural,Footnote 10 contemporary categorisations tend instead to distinguish between poststructuralist feminism and feminist standpoint, or some other configuration based on epistemological divisions.Footnote 11 While it is not our aim here to offer a mapping of the branches of feminist IR, we are interested in the process through which radical feminist thought has been written out of the discipline. By analysing the origin story of feminist IR, we find that the academic practices around its production have problematically missed the debate about feminist theory elsewhere in academia, including resolving questions around: ‘are there foundational ideas on which we all ground our work? And does feminist theory provide this foundation?’Footnote 12 Rather, there has been a seeming homogenisation of feminist work within IR under the banner of ‘feminist theory’, but which has not sufficiently addressed what it is that makes work feminist in international relations. As such, we find the relationship between radical feminism and feminist IR deeply unresolved.
As the introductory quote indicates, defining radical feminism is a fraught task. Some definitions focus on radical feminism as a social movement (the women's liberation movement), which began during the late 1960s, rather than discrete ideology.Footnote 13 Others try to define radical feminism based on a constellation of common beliefs held by self-identified radical feminists, such as a politics centred on women's lived experiences, an emphasis on the sexual division of labour, belief in consciousness-raising, or the rejection of specific practices such as sex work. Some try to specify a central tenet, such as those who emphasise the term radical as signifying sexism as the root oppression from which all other forms originate.Footnote 14 Many definitions entail broad statements about the end goals of radical feminism, such as Cellestine Ware's claim that ‘radical feminism is working for the eradication of domination and elitism in all human relationships’.Footnote 15 Others still define radical feminism by the forms of feminism that it isn't (liberal, Marxist, socialist, cultural, postmodern, etc.).Footnote 16
While all these definitions provide some insight, they provide little clarity regarding the fuzzier boundaries of radical feminist thought (what is the precise line between radical feminism and lesbian separatism, or cultural feminism, or socialist feminism, etc.).Footnote 17 This challenge is not unique to radical feminism. However, the challenge is compounded by the tendency in radical feminism to reject the academic writing style common in political theory, on the basis that it is alienating and divorced from women's experience.Footnote 18 Due to these considerations we do not aim to define radical feminism as a coherent ideology, but instead focus on radical feminism as an intelligible corpus of work that is defined by a set of canonical texts that have come to be accepted as radical feminist.Footnote 19 In drawing on these texts, we focus on three key tenets that unify radical feminist work: the belief in the transhistorical oppression of women by men (patriarchy); the role of sexual relations in establishing this oppression; and a commitment to revolutionary emancipation from patriarchy by abolishing oppressive sex/gender roles. We recognise that this does not answer the messier questions regarding boundaries of radical feminism, but we believe this definition is sufficient for guiding our interrogation of radical feminist work in IR.
While the radical feminist inheritance within IR can be clearly charted in the foundational notions of the transhistorical nature of patriarchy, the causes and consequences of male violence, and the power and construction of sex/gender roles in international politics, direct engagement with radical feminist scholarship is conspicuously absent in feminist IR. Looking for direct references to radical feminism within IR theory, it appears almost exclusively as either a foil for making anti-essentialist arguments, as a vague reference in summaries of feminist thought, or as an issue-specific approach relevant to the study of rape or the sex trade. In each of these frames of engagement, direct citation of radical feminists is rare, generalising claims are common, and discussion is superficially dismissive instead of engaged.
Drawing on the framework offered by Clare Hemmings, from her book Why Stories Matter,Footnote 20 we begin by tracing the ‘story’ of feminist IR and the treatment of radical feminism therein. In so doing, we suggest that engagement with radical feminist thought in IR has been characterised by shallowness, mischaracterisation, and silencing, often to support a narrative of radical feminism's death, giving way to other (newer) modes of feminism. To support this claim, we explore representations of radical feminist work and present citation analysis of ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’ chapters in International Relations textbooks, key edited volumes, and monographs written by feminist IR scholars. Through this analysis, we argue that representations of radical feminism's death have limited the radical potential of feminist IR. We believe that re-engagement with radical feminism has the potential to enrich contemporary debates on key issues (such as sexuality, the state, and international political economy) and can help feminist IR to avoid the danger of what Sandra Whitworth called ‘intellectual traps’ of replicating the very power relations within the discipline that feminist IR initially set out to address.Footnote 21
Why stories (of feminist IR) matter
We begin with the call from Hemmings to start ‘from invested attention to silences in the history of feminist theory’ in order to complicate the problematic uniformity of representations of feminist thought in contemporary feminist IR.Footnote 22 In her book, Why Stories Matter, Hemmings seeks to expose the silences, not to rewrite a more ‘correct’ version of the history of feminist thought, but rather, to analyse ‘the politics that produce and sustain one version of history as more true than another, despite the fact that we know that history is more complicated than the stories we tell about it’.Footnote 23 In her analysis, she foregrounds the role of both citation and affect as key techniques that reinforce and reproduce a hegemonic narrative of Western feminist thought, as citational practices assign scholars and ideas to particular epochs in the story of the progress of feminist thought, while the affect with which the story is told produces particular feelings in the reader about the works cited.
The story of feminist IR has very closely reflected the version that Hemmings calls ‘progress narratives’, which advance the idea that the generational shifts of feminist theory have been one of reform or correction, advancing from the problematic assumptions and viewpoints of earlier decades, to a more enlightened and uncontested version of feminism that has, in essence, learned from its mistakes. Thus, what interests us here is twofold: exposing the hegemonic story of feminist IR in lines with narratives of progress and the politics involved in its development; and, secondly, making visible the absent presences contained within this narrative, particularly in terms of the radical feminist thought that has hung over the political grammar of feminist IR. As Enloe reminds us, those occupying the margins in any particular power relationship are not there simply through neglect or omission, but through active and sustained labour of those with power to determine where the ‘centre’ is and what is included therein.Footnote 24 Hemmings similarly notes this labour in the different narratives of feminist thought, pointing out ‘the sheer affective labor required to secure these narratives as generational, the work needed to ward off “the other” in both narratives’.Footnote 25 In this, not only must we be attentive to the broad sweeps that the progress narrative prevalent in feminist IR uses to obscure the degree of contestation both through time and in the present, but also the politics of such sweeps ‘as a mechanism for obscuring these contests’.Footnote 26 As such, we extend the critique of silence that has been a particular concern for feminist IR to encompass an examination of feminist IR scholarship itself.Footnote 27
Again, the purpose of this article is not to ‘correct’ the story of feminist IR that has evolved of late or to assign blame to particular scholars. Rather, our aim is to revitalise theoretical debate in the scholarship as a form of praxis. As Sandra Whitworth argued in 1994, while we can celebrate any feminist analysis of international relations as preferable over the historical silences in the discipline, ‘we must resist … the urge to turn off our critical faculties when considering feminist work in international relations’.Footnote 28 She warns that
[f]eminist studies which replicate the ontology and epistemology of mainstream International Relations theory contribute little to either feminist or IR theory. In doing so, moreover, feminist academics not only fall into intellectual traps, but more importantly, have lost sight of the political imperatives which inform feminism … A theory which succumbs to either the fallacy of liberalism's political neutrality or postmodernism's political paralysis does nothing to further this objective.Footnote 29
Instead, the critique we advance herein is meant to highlight how the figurative death of radical feminism has implications with regards to the production of a ‘knowledge culture’ within feminist IR and the (re)production of disciplining practices internal to this scholarship.Footnote 30
The representation of radical feminism in feminist IR
We began our investigation into the representation of radical feminism in feminist IR assuming to find evidence of progress narratives, resting on a considered engagement with the core tenets of radical feminism, but ultimately a conceptual evolution away from its structural basis for understanding women's oppression. We were surprised, however, to find virtually no engagement with either radical feminist thought or its key proponents. While there exist, in political theory, important debates on how feminism may deal with the ‘agent-structure problem’, our survey found no such debate replicated within feminist IR to justify its abandonment of radical feminism. Instead, there appears to be a mirroring of the broader trend within academic feminism noted by Liz Stanley and Sue Wise towards an homogenisation of ‘feminist theory’ such that ‘feminist theory now contains considerably more of the latter (theory) and considerably less of the former (feminism), and takes the form of a “parallel project” running alongside, in many respects mimicking, but rarely influencing, mainstream/malestream social theory’.Footnote 31 Having not had this debate, the corpus of feminist IR and its origin story problematically straddles both having ‘progressed’ from simplistic, generalised, and sometimes violent structural analyses offered by radical feminism while systematically relying on the structural analyses of radical feminists in their critiques of gender-blind mainstream IR, as we will explore below.
While early feminist IR texts noted the existence of radical feminism and (often superficially) engaged with some of its key theorists, by the early 2000s radical feminism all but disappears from the landscape of feminist IR scholarship. In order to support our claim that the death of radical feminism in feminist IR has not been the result of sustained and considered debate over the value of its theoretical contributions, we survey key texts of feminist IR scholarship for their representation of radical feminism, both in name and in concept. We employ critical discourse analysis on texts selected as representative of feminist IR, including: ‘feminism’ and/or ‘gender’ chapters in International Relations textbooks and key edited volumes and monographs written by feminist IR scholars from 1989–2015. The second category of texts was identified through a survey of more than fifty syllabi on Gender and/or Feminism in International Relations available in the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Syllabus Bank and the European Consortium for Political Research Syllabus Bank. Critical discourse analysis was used on these texts to illuminate their representations of radical feminist theory and/or radical feminists and for analysing silences with regards to radical feminist contributions to foundational concepts in feminist IR, while citation analysis was employed to understand the depth and breadth of engagement with radical feminist works (see supplementary material: Appendix 1 and Appendix 2).
We trace here two different phenomena with relation to the representation of radical feminism in feminist IR. The first is its death – how radical feminism goes from present in representations of feminist theory in IR to being suddenly absent from the scope of feminism. The second is its enduring influence – that is, how radical feminism remains an absent presence in contemporary scholarship through veiled and unreflexive references to key tenets of radical feminist thought.
The death of radical feminism
International Relations theory textbooks in the early period of feminist IR began incorporating chapters on ‘Feminism’ or ‘Gender’ in the mid-1990s,Footnote 32 written by the first generation of feminist IR scholars like Cynthia Enloe, Ann Tickner, Jindy Pettman, V. Spike Peterson, and Sandra Whitworth. Within these chapters, feminist theory was categorised into strands, including: liberal, radical, socialist, and postmodern/poststructuralist,Footnote 33 reflecting the trend in academic texts of describing feminist ideas through a ‘litany of theoretical “isms”’ that were ‘constructed and lined up against each other in textbook after textbook, classroom after classroom, as supposed “descriptions” of feminism “on the ground” … [each] presented as “true fact”’.Footnote 34 In these early summaries, authors varied with regards to their characterisation of radical feminism. While many were measured, presenting it straightforwardly and on par with other strands of feminism (though not unproblematically, as will be shown below),Footnote 35 or engaging in sustained discussion of its (potential) application to international relations,Footnote 36 others were critical.Footnote 37 Yet, within nearly all of these works, the author ultimately rejects radical feminism on the basis of common discursive frames.
The survey of germinal feminist IR texts illustrates three frames through which radical feminism was discursively constructed in the grotesque, allowing for its figurative death in the discipline. Firstly, there is a conflation of radical feminism with cultural feminism, particularly around the idea of biological determinism of sex-differentiated human characteristics.Footnote 38 This results in the charge of radical feminism being too woman-centred and neglecting to consider how men, too, are affected by structures of patriarchy and issues like male violence, sexual exploitation, and abuse.Footnote 39
Most often in these works, radical feminism is mentioned when discussing women's anti-war activism, and, citing Mary Daly, to argue that radical feminism believes women to be naturally more inclined to peace and peacefulness.Footnote 40 The representation of radical feminism as biologically essentialist hinges on accounts of radical feminist peace activists who became prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, and who challenged militarisation as an extension of male violence.Footnote 41 Early feminist IR regularly cites Mary Daly's arguments in Gyn/Ecology, which focused on the role of mythology in patriarchy, to characterise radical feminist understanding of gender.Footnote 42 While Mary Daly is the archetypal radical feminist most in early feminist IR used to represent radical feminism as essentialist/determinist, a cursory look at her work finds numerous statements in opposition to biological determinism and the belief that male oppression stems from ‘his rationalizing supremacy on the basis of biological difference’.Footnote 43 While there were clearly debates in early radical feminist work over the potential biological origin of male supremacy, and a not insignificant number of groups who took a cultural feminist position, these approaches were not the radical feminist position; many radical feminists challenged aspects of Daly's work in Gyn/Ecology for embracing myth-making too readily.Footnote 44 Rather, the ideas about the origins of male violence were widely debated and its biological origins ultimately rejected by most radical feminists. Even feminists like Shulamith Firestone, who traces patriarchy to the physical ability of men to overpower women, argued that the solution was not to retreat into essentialism but to move beyond gender binary.Footnote 45 When feminist IR conflates radical feminism with cultural feminism, it does not engage with these debates, rarely cites the scholarship it critiques; nor does it aim to reconcile elements of contradiction, but relies on broad, imprecise accounts of Daly that decontextualise her work from the context in which it was written and purpose for which it was written.
Secondly, and relatedly, there is the common charge that radical feminism is essentialist and universalising, unwilling to account for differences between women based on race, class, sexuality, or otherwise. Issue is taken with ‘Radical feminism's attribution of all women's oppression to an undifferentiated concept of patriarchy.’Footnote 46 Even the most sustained engagement with radical feminism, a chapter written by Anne Sisson Runyan, echoes this critique. In this text, Runyan reduces the analysis of radical feminists to assumptions about innate differences in men's and women's sexuality, despite earlier in her analysis noting the belief of radical feminists that more egalitarian sexualities could be socially produced. Ultimately, she concludes that because ‘not all men’ benefit from male supremacy,Footnote 47 because there is no (possibility for) sisterhood, and because radical feminism seeks to invert power relations in a way that will/might be oppressive to men, that ‘the future is not female. Women as well as men are complicit in creating the current world politics-as-usual. None of us are innocent.’Footnote 48
By not engaging directly with much radical feminist work, early feminist IR scholars overlooked both the attempts of the second-wave women's liberation movement to address ‘interlocking’ oppressions of sex, race, and class, but also the recognition of women's complicity in the status quo.Footnote 49 The first editorial issue of an early women's liberation magazine off our backs, explicitly notes the ‘dual nature of the women's movement’: that women not only need to be liberated from men's domination, but must also ‘become aware that there would be no oppressor without the oppressed, that we carry the responsibility for withdrawing the consent to be oppressed. We must strive to get off our backs, and with the help of our sisters to oppose and destroy that system which fortifies the supremacy of men while exploiting the mass for profit of the few.’Footnote 50 In nearly every statement and manifesto, as well as in most key texts, radical feminists explicitly recognised and theorised the different experiences of women under patriarchy along racial and class lines, noting the especially disadvantaged positions of racial minority and working-class women.Footnote 51
Similarly, the charge made that radical feminists employed the concept of patriarchy in a monolithic and undifferentiated way is inaccurate. In her groundbreaking Sexual Politics, Kate Millett explains the means by which both race and sex operate as castes under, specifically, Western patriarchy. She recognises these conditions as contextually contingent and the trends she outlines as specific to Western societies.Footnote 52 This is not to suggest that radical feminist writing always adequately addressed these intersecting issues. Significant criticism was directed towards particular radical feminists for their failure to understand intersecting oppression, such as Mary Daly over the Eurocentrism of Gyn/Ecology by other radical feminists of colour such as Audre Lorde.Footnote 53 However, the depiction of radical feminism as being entirely, uniquely, and irredeemably insensitive to these factors is not evident from radical feminist texts. Additionally, this grotesque representation overlooks the involvement of and publications of radical feminist women of colour.Footnote 54
Finally, there is the trope of radical feminism as ‘old’ or passé, relying on outdated modes of analysis that are unable to account for the ‘complexities’ of modern human existence.Footnote 55 Christine Sylvester's Feminist Theory and International Relations (1994) is perhaps the one feminist IR text to most seriously attempt to engage with radical feminism; yet, the narrative arc of her survey of feminist theory is to build towards the argument that ‘postmodernism exposes the smokescreens, and the histories of the screens and the smoke, in brilliant, eye-opening ways’ that make it preferable to older modes of feminist analysis.Footnote 56 In the same breath that she is arguing against the neat categorisations of feminisms into waves, Sylvester nostalgically laments ‘[w]hen second-wave politics became (prematurely) passé’ as ‘[o]ut of fashion went the empowering old ways of reading the radical oldies – Mary Daly, Sonia Johnson, bell hooks. Too bad.’Footnote 57 Here, it is clear how progress narratives become central in the story of feminist theory in IR. Given these fatal flaws of determinism and essentialism, the final nail in radical feminism's coffin is its relegation to a history from whence we have evolved.
Yet, despite these criticisms levelled against radical feminist thought, actual engagement with radical feminism, through citations to and discussion of particular radical feminist authors, begins in the literature as sparse before disappearing altogether. While many earlier texts discussed radical feminism as a theory, most do not contain citation to radical feminist thinkers within these discussions, but rather depend on through-citations from anthologies of feminist theory or other works.Footnote 58 Where citation to radical feminist scholarship exists, these authors are not generally identified as radical feminists, and their ideas are discussed separately from the overview of radical feminist thought (where it exists). While the average number of citations of radical feminist work across all texts analysed was 3.11, only Mary Daly among radical feminists was consistently identified as a radical feminist theorist.
We found that the limited and shallow engagement with radical feminism perceived in the content and discourse analysis above is also replicated in journal articles of contemporary feminist IR. A citation analysis of more than 720 articles published between 2008 and 2016 yielded a mere 116 citations to radical feminists out of 31,472 total citations, or a citation rate of 0.005 per cent. Prominent radical feminist scholars averaged only 16 total citations within this body of work identified as feminist IR, compared with, for example, Judith Butler who received 189 citations and Michel Foucault, who was cited 117 times (see Appendix 2). Even these figures are misleading, as a disproportionate number of the citations to radical feminists come from the same author across multiple publications.
We also perceive that, with time, reference to radical feminism and citations of radical feminists decline. In updated editions and later versions of key texts, engagement with and/or citation to radical feminists all but disappear. Peterson and Runyan's third and fourth editions of Global Gender Issues drop the original discussion of Robin Morgan's work, and the reference list includes only one radical feminist.Footnote 59 Sylvester, who in 1994 took quite seriously the (‘dated’) contributions of radical feminism, is far less sympathetic in her later Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey, speaking of radical feminism only through her synopses of other feminist IR authors.Footnote 60 Instead, she shifts her approach in this work to positioning postmodern/poststructural feminism in opposition to its ‘others’, coalesced under ‘standpoint-based research’ (more on this below). In this characterisation, most radical feminists drop from her portrayal, save the archetype essentialist/maternalist radical feminist, Mary Daly, and a footnote to Robin Morgan.Footnote 61 She characterises feminist theory in IR as having progressed beyond radical feminism, since ‘[i]n the thrust forward, many feminists have come to recognize that the portraits they painted in the 1970s of women's oppression and emancipation – under the titles of liberal, Marxist, radical, and socialist feminisms – naively relied on epistemologies with checkered records of gender awareness.’Footnote 62
Today, it is far more common to see critiques of radical feminism conflated with standpoint epistemology. As the field evolved, feminist theory in IR became more systematically categorised based on epistemological differences, using the categories: feminist empiricism (or liberal feminism), feminist standpoint, and feminist poststructuralism.Footnote 63 The latest editions of IR textbooks contain updated ‘Feminism’ and (more often) ‘Gender’ chapters that note ‘a large number of approaches’ encompassed by the term feminism, but which characterise their differences as being mainly on the epistemological level. In recategorising feminist theory in this way, feminist IR has written radical feminism out of the story of its development.
What are the political implications of such limited engagement, dismissive narratives, and absenting of radical feminist thought in feminist IR? As Sylvester herself notes, reflecting on citational practices of the mainstream with feminism, ‘in absenting some people and works and including others, a footnote signals to the reader who and what the writer finds uninspiring and unimportant, or perhaps threateningly important. That is, a footnote can give credit where credit is thought to be due and it can snub ideas, withhold credit and recognition, or only partially acknowledge these (as when names are provided but no reference to specific works is offered)’.Footnote 64 Yet, in the works surveyed, feminist IR has frequently marginalised, mischaracterised, and footnoted radical feminist thought. The dismissal of radical feminism as ‘outdated’ and ‘wrong’ on a number of issues without direct engagement with radical feminist theorists serves to reproduce a coherent ‘progress’ narrative of feminist theory in IR that relegates radical feminism to history, leaving it for dead.Footnote 65
The ghost of radical feminism
Despite this disavowal, we find that the germinal texts of feminist IR and their contemporaries owe a great debt to radical feminism, but are curiously silent regarding the source of their radical ideas. In this section, we trace, too, the enduring influence of radical feminism that remain in feminist IR scholarship. We note with curiosity the (sometimes explicit) disavowal of radical feminist ideology, but enduring legacy of this theorising through some of the core concepts and epistemological practices that still define feminist IR. Among these are: the lasting (though increasingly contested) value of naming patriarchy as a structure in international relations, with attendant reference to sex-based class oppression; focus on gender-based violence as a symptom and means of unequal gender relations; and standpoint epistemology as a useful means by which to advance feminist knowledge.
Early texts in feminist IR borrowed liberally from radical feminist thought, particularly in naming the problem of unequal gender relations under the sex-based system of oppression called ‘patriarchy’. In her groundbreaking edited volume, Gendered States,Footnote 66 Peterson's chapter on the formation of the state being fundamentally based on the subordination of women as a class directly builds on radical feminist thought, particularly Firestone's 1970 The Dialectic of Sex, which describes patriarchy as ‘the oldest, most rigid class/caste system in existence, the class system based on sex’.Footnote 67 Since the late 1960s, a core tenet of radical feminist theory has been that women represent a subordinated social class, or a ‘caste’, given the lack of opportunity for social mobility. Early feminist IR extended nascent analysis of radical feminists that took their critique of the domestic sources of women's subordinated class position to understand the complicity of the state in the maintenance of patriarchy and its investment in this status quo.Footnote 68 It was radical feminists who, in arguing that patriarchy is the governing structure of both the state and society, provided the basis for feminist IR critiques of the state and governance institutions as ‘not only contingently patriarchal, but essentially so’.Footnote 69 In organising for women's liberationist groups, radical feminists recognised the complicity of the state in maintaining patriarchal domestic relations as a necessary condition for its own survival and functionFootnote 70 and worked to expose the patriarchal and sexist foundations of all institutions, from the family through the international.Footnote 71 However, as feminist IR evolved its own critique of the state, the ideas are represented as though they have come out of nowhere. Although Peterson explicitly refers to the exploitation of women as a ‘sex/gender class’, she nowhere in this work engages with radical feminists like Firestone, Millett, or Jeffreys, who have been central to constructing the sex-as-class analysis. Nor does she mention ‘radical feminism’ by name. Even the concept ‘the personal is political’ she attributes to Enloe's Bananas, Beaches and Bases, rather than the radical feminist rallying cry of the second-wave movement and Carole Hanisch's essay published in Notes from the Second Year. As a result, contemporary feminist IR critiques of the state begin from Peterson, noting the state ‘as a site of masculinist power that legitimizes these patriarchal structures’,Footnote 72 but lack conceptual clarity over what is meant by ‘patriarchy’ or ‘masculinist power’, its origins, or its prescriptions in terms of women's liberation.
Kate Millett's explicit recognition in Sexual Politics that the political relationship of herrschaft (dominance and subordination) is not only expressed in all aspects of human society, including ‘the military, industry, technology, universities, science, political office, and finance’,Footnote 73 but is so because patriarchy ultimately is reified in not just social, but also political, economic, and cultural relations, which requires institutionalisation through the state, the market, and other structures. As Valerie Bryson has most succinctly summarised, radical feminist analysis of the state has tended to be more implicit than explicit namely due to the fact that they see state power as ‘neither autonomous nor as reducible to the needs of the economy, but as inextricably connected to areas of life such as the family and sexuality that have usually been seen as private and non-political, but which are now seen as basic to all power relationships in society’.Footnote 74
Yet, at the same time that feminist IR scholarship speaks of gender-as-power, the field is increasingly reticent to use the concept of patriarchy to discuss power relations based on sex/gender.Footnote 75 In her 2002 text, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey, Christine Sylvester refers to the problem of patriarchy, but admits that the term makes her ‘squirm’.Footnote 76 Sylvester echoes Elshtain's reluctance to employ the concept, and Charlotte Hooper's rejection if it, because of its roots in radical feminism.Footnote 77 In fact, she criticises Enloe for ‘put[ting] most problems at the feet of patriarchy’ and for borrowing from radical feminism without adequately engaging the prescription offered by the theory: that patriarchy can be dismantled through material action, and importantly through revolutionary, strategic moves.Footnote 78 Today, most feminist IR texts favour the term ‘gender hierarchy’, which emphasises the experiences of men and values that are associated with masculinity.Footnote 79 In her footnote on patriarchy in Gendering Global Conflict, Laura Sjoberg notes that
At the founding moments of feminist IR in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most feminist IR scholars chose terms such as gender inequality and gender hierarchy over patriarchy both to avoid these problems and to demonstrate the complexity of gender relations … With that move, though, feminist IR theorists lost the structural element of the study of patriarchy, in my view.Footnote 80
Despite this unease, patriarchy still features as a key term in many feminist IR introductory texts, and in a significant number of journal article keywords and abstracts. While some authors have consciously chosen to employ the concept of ‘hierarchical gender relations’ as a replacement, we note the often slippage between these terms, which connotes the enduring utility of theorising gender relations as structural and oppressive, based on sex-class categorisations. More significantly, though, the inconsistency in the use of the term and slippages between belie the rarity with which this core concept receives sustained theoretical engagement within feminist IR. The risk that feminist scholarship in IR runs in not deeply engaging with both the roots and theoretical heritage of this core concept is that it loses its analytical utility, becoming an empty signifier that inadvertently silences or reproduces erasures within a body of work meant to be critical of such discursive manoeuvres.
A second site we find radical feminism's enduring influence evident are in feminist IR's focus on gendered and gender-based violence. Men's violence against women (and the environment, and society, and life on earth itself) was a core focus of radical feminism from the early days of consciousness-raising groups. As women began to share their personal experiences of male violence, they began to recognise the systemic and systematic nature of this violence and from this recognition sprang radical feminist theory of the relationship between men's violence and patriarchy.Footnote 81 From their early recognition of interpersonal violence as a coercive expression of patriarchal power when the socialisation of women's subordination failed, feminists soon began to connect broader forms of violence and of militarism to the same patriarchal roots.Footnote 82 Betty Reardon's influential Sexism and the War System,Footnote 83 for example, resonates with the radical feminist critique of militarism and the picture painted by radical feminists of international politics ‘closely resembl[ing] gang fights in the playground. The leader is the one acknowledged to have superior force: his power is then augmented by his position – in effect, the power of his underlings is added to his own. They give this power to him and get certain benefits – protection, enhanced prestige from the relationship to the leader.’Footnote 84 Reardon directly engages radical feminist perspectives of the care/kill dualism that perpetuates militarism as well as sexist repression, as well as the idea that male (sexualised) violence is fundamental to the structural condition of the war system. During the 1960s, radical feminists argued that ‘the Pentagon begins at home’, a strategic response to the subordination of women's anti-war activism to the war ‘reality’ of men and the draft.Footnote 85 This approach draws directly to feminist anti-militarism that arose from feminist critiques of patriarchal state violence. As early as 1971, radical feminists groups were involved in political activism against state militarism, and produced wide-ranging critiques of the links between patriarchy and state violence.Footnote 86 Reardon's analysis of violence as linked to male domination and state use of force strongly echoes radical feminist views, evident in statements like ‘The permission society accords men to maintain dominion over women by the threat and use of violence can be viewed as a significant cause of most forms of violence, both overt and structural.’Footnote 87 It was precisely radical feminists’ interest in the phallocentrism of militarism and weapons adoration that gave meaning to Carol Cohn's influential ‘Sex and Death’ article, which made evident the intricate and intimate ways that masculinity, sexuality, and war become entwined in the practice of global security.Footnote 88
So, too, are the concerns of feminist IR scholars with practices of sexual exploitation and sexual violence indebted to radical feminism. Not only in terms of the international advocacy that got the traffic in women proscribed in international law,Footnote 89 which stemmed from decades of radical feminist prostitution abolition campaigning, but much more so in making explicit the links between masculine sex roles, militarism, and sexual exploitation and abuse.Footnote 90 Further, attention to sex-selective acts of violence and killings, made explicit by Daly's term ‘gynocide’ and popularised by Diane Russell's term ‘femicide’, is precisely the feminist curiosity that has shed light on the forms of violence that had previously been obscured from notions of state security or even ‘human security’.Footnote 91 The radical feminist analysis of Daly and Russell on sex-specific forms of violence, as well as Catherine MacKinnon and Susan Brownmiller's work on the role of rape in armed conflicts, laid the groundwork for contemporary international legal frameworks for addressing forms of gendered violence as a war crime, crime against humanity, and as an element of genocide and torture. Without their contributions, we would not have the now vast body of feminist IR scholarship that is focused specifically on this issue.Footnote 92 It was radical feminists who argued that sexual violence exists on a continuum and that it must be conceived of as a form of violence, and a political act, not as a moral transgression.Footnote 93 From this basis, feminists in IR have been equipped with the analytical tools to talk about not just explicitly sexual acts of interpersonal violence as an expression of power and to critique the sexualisation of power/domination, as offered by earlier radical feminists, but to also extend this analysis to understand how the construction of masculinity springs out of the sexualisation of domination and valorisation of aggression and war making.Footnote 94
These contributions were formative to feminist IR both in setting the agenda of its work and in core theoretical concepts that inform later work. Radical feminism influences feminist IR due to the enduring utility of these core concepts, even if the intellectual tradition is no longer rigorously dealt with. These contributions are not, however, purely relics of a bygone age of radical feminist theorising that has since died off. Instead, when we look at the more contemporary contributions of radical feminist scholarship, we find that they have continuing relevance to key questions in the field.
Unearthing radical feminist thought on the international
In this last section, we explore what might be gained by returning to the roots of radical feminist thought directly for contemporary debates in feminist IR. While we note that radical feminism has never truly died, with current scholars conducting radical feminist analysis on internationally relevant subjects (such as Caroline Norma's work on military sexual exploitation or Kaye Quek's work on forced marriage and sex trafficking), this section explores what can be gained by returning to those ‘radical oldies’.Footnote 95 In particular, radical feminist theorising continues to provide unique contributions regarding the system of sex-class oppression, the central role of heterosexuality in maintaining this system, and the feminist case for revolutionary political action in order to dismantle it.
We are not alone in seeing value in returning to the roots of radical feminism, as can be seen in Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern's recent article ‘Curious Erasures: The Sexual in Wartime Sexual Violence’.Footnote 96 In their exploration of the sexual in sexual violence, the authors note that feminist IR scholarship have been curiously inattentive to theorising on the sexual (sexuality, desire, eroticism, pertaining to biological sex, etc.) in their accounts of sexual violence.Footnote 97 Charting the development of scholarship on sexual violence, the authors suggest that this has largely resulted from a misuse of Susan Brownmiller's work, and a lack of attention to the broader radical feminist conversations that informed current theorisation on sexual violence as violence.Footnote 98 Emphasising the importance of a contextual reading of this foundational theorisation, they suggest that ‘Brownmiller's (and others) work should be read as a product of their time (the women's movement of the 1970s) which opened up inquiry into sex and sexuality to probe its relations to power, violence and dominance, and crucially, to politics (e.g., Dworkin 1976; Jeffreys 1990).’Footnote 99
Eriksson Baaz and Stern have noted that despite the prominence of sexual violence scholarship in contemporary feminist IR and the increased interest in sexuality, key insights are missed if scholars leave radical feminism for dead.Footnote 100 By returning to the root sources of theorising on conflict-related sexual violence, Eriksson Baaz and Stern have not only been able to contextualise current thinking, but to augment current theoretical frameworks that have moved in very different directions since the cannon of radical feminist classics was penned. Focusing on the relationship between violence and sexuality within patriarchal heterosexuality, Eriksson Baaz and Stern put forward a powerful case that much of contemporary work within feminist IR on gendered violence unintentionally reifies war/peace, sex/violence distinctions.Footnote 101 What their article highlights is just one of the ways in which radical feminist scholarship on sexuality, and in particular the critical scholarship on heterosexuality, domination, and the production of desire can speak powerfully to current focus issues in feminist IR in unexplored ways.
Classic radical feminist texts, such as Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, Andrea Dworkin's Woman Hating, and Kathleen Barry's Female Sexual Slavery all placed sexuality, and the erotics of heterosexuality in particular, at the centre of their analysis.Footnote 102 These texts take sex and sexuality not only as subjects worthy of study, but as key fixtures of their analysis of politics and gendered power. While much of the recent work on sexuality in IR has emphasised poststructural readings of discourse, performativity, and fluidity, radical feminist work sought to construct structural and material accounts of sexual power under patriarchy. In ways that resonate with recent interest in sexuality from feminist IR scholars, this scholarship offers a rich set of resources for understanding power by presenting a contrasting analysis to much of recent queer theory work on sex. By suggesting a return to the roots of radical feminist scholarship, we do not mean to suggest that it will supplant current work, but that like Eriksson Baaz and Stern's exploration of the sexual, it will open new avenues, provide other theoretical tools and expose current thought to a different sensibility of feminist research. As with work on sexuality we believe that a similar return to radical feminist thought may provide added richness to contemporary feminist IR theorising on the gendered state and growth in international political economy (IPE).
The nature of the state has possibly been the most fundamental question within the discipline of IR.Footnote 103 Despite this, in the forward to the recent edited volume Revisiting Gendered States, V. Spike Peterson has noted the state remains undertheorised in International Relations.Footnote 104 As feminists are increasingly interested in subjects such as feminist foreign policy and feminist diplomacy, this under-theorisation has become increasingly untenable and precipitated a return to the state.Footnote 105 Radical feminist scholarship began with trying to theorise the relationship between patriarchy and the state. For pioneering radical feminist Kate Millet, this meant that her analysis of sexual politics was centred on the state defined as ‘the institution whereby that half of the populace which is female is controlled by that half which is male’.Footnote 106 Millet's understanding has underpinned the subsequent radical feminist theorisations on the state, which has looked to explain the state, not as the sole site of political activity, but as the institutionalisation of men's power.Footnote 107 Later theorists, such as Catherine MacKinnon, chart the institutional development of the state out of prior forms of private patriarchal domination in the household.Footnote 108 This distinction has been drawn between what socialist feminist Sylvia Walby's calls the private patriarchy of paternal domination in the household and the public patriarchy exhibited in the formal political and economic structures of society.Footnote 109 MacKinnon argues that the state has an intimately intertwined relationship with gender oppression, solidifying and reinforcing oppressive power structures on the one hand and providing meagre protections for marginalised peoples on the other.
Radical feminist theories of the state take the sexual politics of patriarchy as their theoretical foundation, developing understandings of the state that rule out of private patriarchal configurations. While the liberal legal tradition sees the state as the impartial arbiter for disagreements and contention, MacKinnon suggests that this stance smuggles notions of the natural citizen from male patterns of behaviour while ignoring the patriarchal foundation of existing political orders.Footnote 110 Radical feminists started from the premise that, as an institution created by men, the state is an embodiment of male interests. This recognition led to radical feminists analysing the state ‘as an arena of conflict which is systematically biased against women but within which important victories can nevertheless be won; it is essential to understand the power relations that are involved and the tremendous obstacles that women face, but this need not lead to the pessimistic abandonment of conventional politics’.Footnote 111 It is this patriarchal foundation, MacKinnon argues, that underpins the core structure of international law and contemporary foreign relations.Footnote 112 For this reason, MacKinnon characterises the international state system as ‘an apex form in which the power of men is organised both among men and over women while purporting to institutionalise peace and justice’.Footnote 113 Men's dominance, MacKinnon argues, has been codified into international law such that so as to intentionally exclude the aggression against and exploitation of women, resulting in the systematic dehumanisation of women within the international realm.Footnote 114 Unlike later feminist IR theorists, who began with malestream IR theorising and then began to read gender into it, radical feminism's starting point of women's experiences led them to profoundly different conclusions. Returning to radical feminist theorising on the state has much to offer, in terms of theoretical difference to current models present in IR. This is indicative of the tradition of radical feminist scholarship on the topic and indicates the vibrant corpus of work that may can enrich the discipline.
The second areas we would like to highlight that would benefit from revisiting radical feminism is the growth in feminist international political economy. While interest in international political economy has always been present in feminist IR, recent years have seen a rapid growth in scholarship, which blends work from feminist International Relations theory and feminist political economy. These scholars have highlighted the importance of a feminist analysis of households, care work, and sexual violence in understanding world affairs.Footnote 115 Radical feminist political economics has, since the 1970s, sought to understand how women's private economic exploitation forms the basis for the public economic system and the political arrangements around it.Footnote 116 One of the central concerns of early radical feminist scholarship was how the marriage contract and the extraction of women's care work was essential to the organisation of the economy.Footnote 117 Radical feminist historian Gerda Lerner traced the origins of trade in human societies to the trade in women that began after the agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia shifted these societies from matrilocal, matrilineal kinships to patrilocal, patrilineal, and eventually patriarchal.Footnote 118 The subordination of women in peace, and the enslavement and exploitation of women's sexual and reproductive capacities by invading tribes during war, became the basis for the formation of class distinctions and the concept of property, itself. These accounts emphasise the central role of heteronormativity in producing women as a class available for economic exploitation and argued against the devaluation of women's care work. The direct analysis of how sexuality is linked to the political and economic exploitation of women aligns closely with the work of more recent feminist scholars like Claire DuncansonFootnote 119 and Juanita Elias,Footnote 120 while providing a distinct account of how to redress inequity though revolutionary action starting with the personal.
Radical feminism approaches the central subjects of feminist IR in profoundly different ways to contemporary scholars in this field, using different methods and sensibilities to contemporary scholarship. Radical feminists’ commitment to unmaking the structures of patriarchy through revolutionary action, rather than tinkering at the edges of male domination provides a distinct approach from liberal feminism's reform approach or poststructural efforts to trouble gender. We do not envision that a return to radical feminist work will result in wholesale adoption, but see productive space for conversation with the roots of many key concepts used in contemporary feminist IR. While these three areas (sexuality, the state, and political economy) are hardly an exhaustive list of areas that might warrant being revisited by feminist IR, these examples highlight the added value of going back to the root of radical feminist work. Much as mainstream IR has gained much from revisiting the foundational works of the discipline, we feel that radical feminist work has the capacity to contextualise and enrich contemporary debates.
Conclusion: Radical feminist IR redux
Ultimately, we have sought in this article to better understand the curious absence of radical feminist thought in contemporary feminist IR scholarship and the potential of returning to this work. Our dual concerns have been with the representation of radical feminism as outdated and the enduring influence of concepts that originate in the radical feminist tradition in contemporary feminist IR scholarship. In doing this, we have not aimed to construct a coherent camp of radical feminist IR. Such a project of ideological reconstruction would be likely to do little beyond reinforcing the pernicious camp rivalries and ‘on brand’ thinking that tends to dominate the field.Footnote 121 Moreso, we are interested in highlighting how, despite its erasure from feminist IR, radical feminism's contributions have the capacity to inform how contemporary feminist IR understands the international. We have found that not only does the treatment of radical feminism within the discipline impoverish feminist IR's intellectual inheritance, which remains salient to core questions in the field, but that it also does a disservice to the range of theorising that has been done within a radical frame.
Radical feminism continues to provide vibrant and provocative analysis of women's oppression on a global scale. Stemming from its original contribution of the theorisation on patriarchy, radical feminism has provided incisive insights on sex, nature of the state, and the international political economy. Yet, the prevailing ‘progress’ narrative of the story of feminist IR both fails to recognise the enduring significance of core radical feminist concepts to shape the discipline and the enduring interventions of radical feminists into the study of International Relations.
Feminists in IR have levelled serious criticism of the IR mainstream for its efforts to obscure, misrepresent, and write out feminist contributions from the discipline.Footnote 122 As accounts of feminist IR and its role within the discipline have largely been generated by other feminists, the writing out of radical feminist voices is particularly troubling.Footnote 123 As with the feminist critique of mainstream IR's representation of their work, our goal has not been to suggest that no critical commentary should be directed towards radical feminist work, but, rather, that the representations so far have entailed very little substantive engagement in favour of silence and misrepresentation. Our aim is not to discourage robust criticisms of radical feminist work; such an effort would be meaningless, considering the breadth of options within the cannon.Footnote 124 Rather, we call on feminist scholars within the discipline of IR to re-evaluate how radical feminist work has been represented, and to engage in good faith with radical feminist scholarship, both in legacy and contemporary forms, which endures outside the disciplinary confines of international relations. We believe that rejecting the discursive narratives that have facilitated radical feminism's death from the discipline will allow feminist work to better address theoretical contestations in feminist work, and to avoid reproducing the problematic citational practices that have been directed from mainstream IR towards feminist work overall.
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr Meagan Tyler, the History and International Theory Reading Group at the University of Queensland, and the panel and audience at Australian Political Studies Association Annual Convention in 2017 for feedback provided on earlier versions of this article. We also thank the anonymous reviewers who provided insightful comments and suggestions for revisions. The generosity and expertise provided have improved this article in innumerable ways and through its many iterations across six years of development.
Supplementary material
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