Abstract
Recently I have been mulling over the politics of casual forgetting. This has been prompted by working with two newly formed groups of seemingly very smart international political analysts. The first is a loosely knit group of scholars trying to track down contemporary US overseas military bases—a harder task than one might imagine. Generally, the members are critical of the global sprawl of military bases, but approach military basing from diverse scholarly perspectives: some historical, others ethnographic and still others geopolitical. Participants gathered around the table, both scholars and activist analysts, do their research in Japan, Hawaii, Aruba, Diego Garcia, Guam, Cuba and Ecuador. The second group, also nascent, is homing in on militarisation: what exactly it is and what are its subtle causes and far-reaching consequences. The lively discussions ranged from civil-military institutional relationships to discourse analysis. In this group, too, the intellectual impulses are critical. The men and women joining each series of conversations had come of professional age within the last 20 years. Yet, despite their generational location, thoughtfulness, consciously critical outlook and political acuity, collectively each of these groups managed to let gender slip off their collective agendas. And explicitly feminist questions were scarcely raised. Yet when, finally, they were, what was striking was the scramble around each table at least to appear to engage with them. That is, something has happened over the last 20 years: while there is still a masculinist comfort when feminist questions are ‘forgotten’, when they are raised there is a collective embarrassment and attempts to demonstrate short-term serious attention. This may be intellectual progress, a form of progress that the authors of this energising issue help us chart. But none of them underestimate the continued attentiveness it is taking to ensure that comfortable masculinist forgetfulness does not win the disciplinary day.
How exactly does this masculinist forgetfulness happen? The answer is at the heart of this special issue of BJPIR. And the answer is multi-stranded and subtle. As these careful articles reveal, the reason why questions about the politics of masculinity and the politics of femininity are so rarely posed by so many otherwise serious International Relations (IR) scholars is more than a matter of simply forgetting. ‘Oh, I meant to ask that.’ The writers of the essays you are about to read demonstrate that IR scholars of this generation, especially developing their careers and analyses in Britain, have been surrounded by smart gender IR analysts for several decades; sometimes they are just down the corridor or on the same journal editorial board. So ‘forgetting’ would appear to be quite a conscious effort. Thus, one way to read the present articles is as an exploration into the British culture of IR scholarship in 2007.
And the British condition seems worth special consideration. As I read these provocative articles, I started to wonder what a comparable special issue would be for ‘Gender and International Relations in India’, or ‘in Germany’, or ‘in Turkey’ or ‘in Australia’. That is, what cultural forces are especially at work in the British ‘world’ of scholarly International Relations that may or may not be so influential in another country's IR field? Several possibilities came to mind: firstly, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), with its budgetary and careerist rewards and punishments, its centralised ledgers of the journals that ‘count’ and those that ‘don't count’ and its apparent discouragement of interdisciplinary research and publication. Then there is the British state's ongoing ambivalence towards Europe and the US, out of which may flow particular notions of what ‘security studies’ encompasses and which foreign policy topics ‘matter’. Finally, there is the apparent institutional withdrawal of support from academic women's studies in Britain. At the same time as women's studies is spawning record numbers of academic departments, university jobs, refereed journals, university press lists, international agency research contracts and graduate degree programmes in India, the United States, Turkey, Israel, Canada, Eastern Europe, Japan and China, the discipline is being starved of funds and jobs in Britain. This cannot help undercutting its scholarly credibility in the British IR community. As feminist analysts have reminded us again and again, in order to explain any puzzling dynamic, including masculinist forgetfulness, we must aim our curiosity simultaneously at cultural and structural potential causalities.
As the casual forgetting that infected the military bases and the militarisation investigatory networks shows, some of the intellectual dynamics at work in Britain today can also be witnessed in other countries. Yet, as one reads these smart essays, it might be worth pondering whether country-specific (not necessarily unique) factors are diluting the intellectual efforts of British International Relations, robbing this important 21st-century scholarly endeavour of its chance to be more analytically subtle and more politically realistic, or whether they interestingly facilitate and create spaces for new theoretical and empirical insights.
Analytical subtlety and political accuracy—these are exactly the rewards flowing from remembering to ask feminist questions about the workings of femininity and of masculinity no matter what the topic being explored in International Relations. The authors and editors of this special issue detail not only the deeply rooted causes of the stubborn resistance to asking those provocative questions, they reveal what we all gain when we do seriously ask them, and invest credibility and budgets in pursuing them. After reading these thoughtful, mind-stretching essays, I had a new sense of hopefulness about the discipline of International Relations, its new self-awareness, its new transformative ambitions. By the time one finishes reading this entire issue, one will feel a new hopefulness about the entire field, from whatever country one is pushing open the windows to get a truer view of international politics.