Reevaluating Gender and IR Scholarship

Sex/Gender

The most important, yet fuzziest concept in Reiter’s article is gender. Although the word appears more than 200 times in the text, it is only defined by implication. Yet, the meaning of the word gender is key to the differences that Reiter misses between “positivist gender/IR” and feminist IR. Meaningful dialogue between these approaches should recognize that authors often use the same word very differently.

Much of the work Reiter counts as “positivist” uses gender interchangeably with sex. By contrast, much of the work he characterizes as “nonpositivist” distinguishes between sex and gender, and theorizes the relationship between the two. Yet Reiter treats the word gender used in both contexts as having the same meaning, even though it does not. And the sex/gender distinction matters for the content of the work. Even the earliest feminist work in IR distinguished sex (a bodily trait of biological maleness and femaleness) and gender (a social construction of masculine and feminine behavioral expectations related to the perception of biological maleness and femaleness). Here, gender is related to, but does not map directly onto, perceptions of sex. Someone’s sex and gender might match (cissexual or cisgender) or be mismatched in some way (trans*, intersex, or genderqueer).

In this view, gender can be seen as a noun (identity), a verb (action), and “a logic which is product/productive of performances of violence and security” (Shepherd 2010, 5). As a noun, gender is identifiers attributed to people—they are labeled male, female, masculine, feminine, butch, femme, and so on. As a verb, gender is something that happens; people, ideas, data, research, and places are gendered by discourses, structures, and positions in the global political arena. As a logic, gender can be deployed in narratives that justify dominance, violence, hierarchy, and devalorization in global politics. Accordingly, gender is not attached to corporeality, although it finds its evidence in materialities (Wilcox 2015).

Being assigned a gender, being gendered, or being subject to gender hierarchy does not happen only to people understood as women. Instead, masculinities and femininities are sometimes tied to people understood to be of the opposite sex, or to objects or actors with no clear sex. For example, societies sometimes feminize men—from unsuccessful male soldiers in war (Eichler 2012) to men in informal economies (Peterson 2010). Interstate relationships can also masculinize and feminize acts and patterns—feminist scholars have written about gendered interstate relationships as diverse as those between the United States, Cuba, and Haiti (Weber 1999), India and Pakistan (Banerjee 2012), and the United States and Iraq (Sjoberg 2006). In these cases, gender is not any less real in global politics because it is a social construction rather than an essential characteristic related to sex. Instead, a variety of international actors live genders everyday, and those genders are constituted and reified across global politics. Social genders are not only a matter of difference but also of inequality between the (valorized) masculine and the (subordinate) feminine.

Newer feminist work, however, also problematizes the tendency to fully separate sex and gender and assume the naturalness of sex and the socialness of gender. Such work intervenes in the presumed naturalness of sex by arguing that not all people are biologically male or female, and sex is not a dichotomy (Fausto-Sterling 2005). Portraying sex as dichotomous excludes those people who fall outside the male/female categories (Heyes 2003). Furthermore, some feminist scholars reason that sex, like gender, is socially constructed and performative. As Judith Butler (1993, xii) argues, sex is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is forced, where “what constitutes the fixity of the body, its movements, will be fully material, but the materiality will be rethought as effect of power.” In this view, the sex/gender dichotomy produces the misnomer of prediscursive sex where, in actuality, sex is not “a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but…a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies” (Butler 1993, 2-3).

In short, feminist work in IR conceptualizes gender as social, performative, or both, while a significant amount of the work that Reiter identifies as positivist conceptualizes gender as sex. Is this observation merely semantic? No. When Reiter tries to construct a dialogue without incorporating these differences in meanings assigned to the key concept (gender), he produces, perhaps inadvertently, artificial comparisons which neglect some core issues necessary to explore for an effective synthesis across knowledge types in the study of gender and global politics.

Take, for example, the question of gender and political leadership, which Reiter (2015, 12) ventures is “perhaps the most direct way that gender might affect IR.” Reiter (with much of the work he cites) frames this as a question of whether biologically female leaders behave differently than biologically male leaders. He then implies that gender means sex: “if women view conflict differently than men, then gender diversity among political leadership…might cause differences in national policy” (Reiter 2015, 12). Reiter’s next few paragraphs cite work that analyzes how female leaders are selected, how they behave, perceptions of female political leaders’ capabilities, and female leaders’ conflict decision-making. In this account of “gender and political leadership,” male leaders do not have a gender and female leaders produce “gender diversity”—so the study of gender and leadership is about properties of female leaders (Reiter 2015, 14).

Feminist work addresses this topic very differently, drawing on a broader, less essentialist notion of gender that is not about women’s sex but about political masculinities and femininities. This literature asks how characteristics associated with masculinities and femininities are valued in leader selection and displayed in leadership practice. This inquiry accounts for sex but cannot be reduced to it. Early feminist IR literature interrogated “the belief, widely held…by both men and women, that military and foreign policy are the arenas of policy-making least appropriate for women” (Tickner 1992, 3). To account for this belief, Tickner (1992, 3) argued that those who select leaders value “strength, power, autonomy, independence, and rationality, all typically associated with men and masculinity” and perceive women as associated with femininity and therefore “too emotional or too weak for life and death decisions” (p. 3). In other words, masculinity is associated with good leadership. ² Feminist scholars have built on this claim by exploring the associations between leadership and militarized masculinity (Enloe 2000), the gendered nature of leadership theorizing (Gill 2006), and the masculinist nature of leadership behavior (Hooper 2001). This literature finds differences in gender expectations, gendering, and gendered behaviors between and toward those understood to be men and women, masculine and feminine subjects (D’Amico and Beckman 1994; Enloe 2000), but does so by asking questions about how leaders represent gender and respond to gendered pressures, how gendered representations of leaders are constructed, and how gendered assumptions underlie the theory and practice of political leadership.

In other words, scholarship with different understandings of gender asks different questions and gets different answers. Scholarship with such differences can be brought into dialogue, but we need to improve upon the missing sex/gender distinction in Reiter’s analysis. Conclusions cannot be compared directly if studies analyze different things. Research on women leaders and investigations of gender in leadership can share insights, but they are not the same, and cannot be effectively brought into dialogue if their differences are elided. Instead, productive dialogue must recognize and navigate those differences.

Positivism/nonpositivism

Rather than considering different interpretations of gender, Reiter categorizes gender and IR work as either “positivist” or “nonpositivist.” Reiter (2015, 3) defines positivism only in the negative: “nonpositivist work often embraced at least one of the following critiques of positivism: scholars are not neutral observers; facts are not neutral; the natural science assumption that predictable patterns systematically determine phenomena may not hold for human behavior.” The reader infers that positivism’s unifying properties are that scholars and facts are neutral and that predictable patterns systematically determine human behavior. To Reiter (2015, 3), the opposite of positivism is “postmodernism.” Nowhere near all nonpositivists are postmodern—some are critical realists, others poststructuralists, still others monists (in Jackson’s [2010] terms). Even assuming a simple dichotomy between positivisms and their constitutive others, Reiter’s dichotomy remains unclear. As King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) and Jackson (2010) argue, it is not the method that is used, but how it is used that determines a study’s epistemological and methodological purposes. Reiter’s “positivist” category is problematic because it is populated almost exclusively by large-n statistical studies. He distinguishes the work by method, when it has differences in methodology, epistemology, and even ontology. Three analytic issues with Reiter’s positivist/nonpositivist dichotomy arise.

First, Reiter’s narrow understanding of positivism leads to a specific approach to synergizing gender and IR research programs. Given that Reiter’s JCR audience engages “social scientific theory and research on human conflict,” (JCR’s “Aims and Scope” 2015) it comes as no surprise that his characterization of positivist and nonpositivist synergies focuses on the ways in which postpositivist work can supply theoretical ideas, questions and puzzles, and hypothesis testing tools to positivist work (Reiter 2015, 4-5). These synergies adhere closely to a methodology aimed at testing whether X causes Y, as do corresponding examples of synergistic research. Reiter’s X-leads-to-Y depiction of the nexus of the two approaches, though intended to be favorable, limits synergies to those that can be evaluated using positivist criteria: does the theory generate new hypotheses, are the independent and dependent variables correlated, and so on. Postpositivist work is therefore judged by its ability to contribute to the production of positivist research, producing a dialogue, but not one among equals.

This asymmetric dialogue causes substantive, rather than just political, problems. For example, Reiter’s (2015) analysis of IPE research on gender and IR both limits positivism to large-N statistical work and undervalues the range of contribution of feminist work. Briefly discussing only four studies, he argues that there is little positivist work in the subfield. But this characterization privileges large-n quantitative work as the agenda setter and arbiter of knowledge production. In so doing, he misses both small-n positivist studies of women and political economy (e.g., Karim 2011; Kabeer, Milward, and Sudarshan 2013), and the complicated causal and constitutive connections that feminist work offers for understanding gendered global and local economies (Peterson 2003; Rai 2013; True 2012). For example, Reiter’s review overlooks work like Sara Meger’s (2015) analysis of the shadow economies that emerge around resource control and how their perpetuation through systematic rape of women demonstrates an intersection of hierarchical economic structures, which suggests the interdependence of global political economy and global security (e.g., True 2015; Elias and Rai 2015).

Reiter’s positivist criteria also obscure the depth and nuance of feminist IR theories. For example, Reiter (2015, 9) features Cohen’s (2013) work as an example of how empirical observations of women perpetrators in gang rapes during wartime can question “a simple, essentialist view that gendered violence during wartime is exclusively men assaulting women,” which he implicitly attributes to postpositivist work. But very little (if any) feminist IR scholarship suggests that women are the only victims of gendered violence in war. Feminist scholarship analyzes women’s political violence (e.g., Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Alison 2009; Parashar 2009, 2014; MacKenzie 2009, 2012; Ortbals and Poloni-Staudinger 2014) and men’s victimization in political violence (e.g., Grey and Shepherd 2013; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013; Zarkov 2001). Further, Cohen’s primary theoretical contribution is not debunking an already-defunct essentialism, but the nuanced analysis of wartime rape as a tool for military socialization focused on the gender (not sex) of perpetrators and victims.

Second, Reiter’s “positivist” and “nonpositivist” categories mask differences within traditions. Some positivist gender and IR scholarship identifies as feminist (e.g., Hudson 2011; Caprioli 2000), while other positivist work explicitly rejects feminism (Carpenter 2003; Jones 2008). Some nonpositivist gender and IR work is theoretically constructivist, while other work draws from critical, poststructural, or postcolonial theory—all with different theoretical assumptions, methodological strategies, and sometimes, different politics (see, e.g., Tickner and Sjoberg 2012). Reiter groups many studies under the “nonpositivist” label despite significant differences. For example, Sjoberg (2013) problematizes Elshtain’s (1987) essentialism and Sjoberg and Tickner’s work is neither the sum total nor representative of the diversity of feminist IR this decade (see, e.g., Parashar 2013b; Shepherd 2013; Teaiwa and Slatter 2013; D’Costa and Lee-Koo 2013). This matters because understanding debates among work in either or both traditions of gender and IR makes dialogue more productive and synthesis more likely to be accurate—accuracy that both has intellectual payoff and descriptive/explanatory leverage about global politics. ³

Third, by dividing gender and IR research into “positivist” and “nonpositivist” categories, Reiter prioritizes epistemology in categorizing research approaches. If the key distinctions were indeed epistemological, then Reiter’s sequential listing of the insights of one and then the other tradition would work, and synergistic dialogue would be straightforward. But the core differences are ontological, which manifest in second-order epistemological differences. That leads us to Reiter’s third dichotomy.

Epistemology/Ontology

The core distinctions between the research programs that Reiter examines are ontological, based on what gender is understood to be. The positivist/postpositivist distinction Reiter makes allows him to elide these differences, characterizing them as epistemological instead. As a result, his assessment cannot fully account for the stakes in gender and IR research. If gender is a dichotomy between maleness and femaleness, and there are essential social characteristics that map onto maleness and femaleness, then it makes sense to study gender objectively, by correlating being male or female with political behaviors. If gender is, on the other hand, social and performative, derived from perceptions about, but in the end removed from, sex, then we should think about discursive structures of gender, relationships of gendered power, and gendered signification as political and as monist—meaning that research results are always constituted by the subjectivities of both the researcher and the researched. Treating ontological differences over how feminists and large-n quantitative scholars see gender and its role in global politics as solely epistemological deceptively makes dialogue between and about the two approaches seem easy. Appreciating the distinct ontological underpinnings that generate different types of questions requires more careful engagement, but can more meaningfully reveal the origins of gender and its relationships to IR.

Women’s Conflict Sexual Violence

Consider a potential dialogue between Cohen’s (2013; positivist) work and female perpetrators of conflict sexual violence in Sierra Leone alongside Sjoberg’s (2016; postpositivist) work on the invisibility of the female wartime rapist offers an example of more direct dialogue between the two traditions. Cohen (2013) and Sjoberg’s (2016) conversation succeed perhaps precisely because they address related but not identical questions. Cohen (2013, 386) aims to explain women’s gender-transgressive wartime sexual violence. She posits that male and female fighters have no essential differences (“women fighters face similar social pressures within armed groups that men do, and…are likely to commit similar forms of violence”) and that participation in gang rape creates cohesion for groups of fighters, women included (Cohen 2013, 386-87). Cohen (2013, 386), however, combines empirical observations about wartime sexual violence with insights from feminist theorizing: “that women perpetrate wartime atrocities is surprising only because of the gendered assumptions that scholars and policymakers often make about women’s capacity to commit violence.” When accounting for women’s sexual violence, Cohen (2013, 399) argues carefully men and women both committing atrocities is not evidence of gender’s irrelevance—instead, “gendered norms are still powerful in these settings, but not in the manner anticipated.” In conclusion, Cohen cautions that (positivist) “researchers should be aware of gendered assumptions—often deeply embedded in the conventional wisdom—when they set out to design surveys, interview protocols, and data-collection tools” (Cohen 2013, 411). Cohen’s positivist gender and IR work takes seriously, and benefit theoretically from engaging, feminist work.

Sjoberg’s (feminist IR) research also addresses women’s perpetration of conflict sexual violence but toward a different end. She asks how the gendered norms that Cohen studies constitute the sexually violent woman as discursively impossible. Observing that “women who commit conflict sexual violence are often ignored, underplayed, stereotyped, sensationalized, or otherwise treated differently,” Sjoberg (2016, 250) analyzes the discursive reliance of male chivalrous fighters’ war justifications on a portrayal of women as innocent and in need of protection. This, Sjoberg argues, makes the invisibility of women wartime rapists overdetermined. Sjoberg then works carefully on a way to break these gendered narratives to make visible sexually violent women, in scholarship, in media outlets, and in law. In so doing, Sjoberg (2016, 74, 105) highlights Cohen’s work as an exemplar of the ability to move past the discursive impossibility of female perpetrators in research, and engages an account of Cohen’s causal story about group pressure based on militarized masculinities, which Cohen (2013, 388, note 22) suggests but does not explore. Sjoberg’s work takes seriously, and benefits theoretically from engaging, the empirical results of positivist gender and IR work.

These two studies directly exchange theoretical ideas and empirical observations and could dialogue even more than they do. A discussion about feminist research methods (Ackerly, Stern, and True 2006) and gendered structures of militarism (Enloe 2010) might help Cohen’s research design respond to gendered assumptions both in IR research designs and in people’s behavior in global politics. Accounting for gender as embodied (e.g., Wilcox 2015) would make Cohen’s theory of wartime sexual violence more complex and open up possibilities for thinking about the materialization of gender in the commission of acts of conflict sexual violence. Cohen’s in-depth case study work could be a template for making women’s conflict sexual violence visible but not sensationalized, helping to break down gendered assumptions about violent women (Gentry and Sjoberg 2015).

A continued, productive dialogue, though, requires recognition that the two studies and the traditions they come from have different aims, address different research questions, and provide different sorts of information, even as they address similar subject matter and are based on much more similar interpretations of sex and gender than most studies separated by Reiter’s “positivist/nonpositivist” divide. Cohen’s interest in what happened and why it happened and Sjoberg’s interest in the constitution and discursive treatment of the research subject are (in Reiter’s terms) complementary. They are not (as Reiter suggests) a sequential analytic development where postpositivist work provides information used by positivists to form hypotheses, which can then be tested to validate postpositivist ideas. Instead, both studies have strengths. Cohen’s careful causal story wields impressively detailed field research; Sjoberg’s discourse analysis provides information about the constitution of the subject of the wartime rapist as male. Both have limitations as well. Cohen’s choice to set aside gendered assumptions that generate surprise about women’s violence makes her account oversimplified. Sjoberg’s work cannot directly provide information about why women perpetrate conflict sexual violence on the individual or group level.

Norms of Sex Equality and CEDAW

Another potential dialogue can be seen between Wade Cole’s (2013) International Studies Quarterly article on the influence of CEDAW on government respect for women’s rights and Laura Shepherd’s (2008a) International Studies Quarterly article on the production of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSC) 1325. Both examine how structures and practices of international governance could (or could not) impact the ways that gender subordination is practiced in daily life. Yet, they draw on very different literatures and take very different approaches. Cole (2013, 233) takes a quantitative, large-n approach; he measures “gendered rights” with “women’s rights outcomes,” and results from his two-stage least squares regression models demonstrate that “CEDAW has a strong positive effect on women’s political rights, no effect on economic rights, and a partially negative effect on social rights.” Cole (2013, 243) is interested in the direct causal effects of signing CEDAW on women’s political rights and argues that the impacts are mediated by democracy, religion, and preexisting women’s education but still statistically significant.

Shepherd (2008a) explores a different international institution in UNSC 1325, but one also directed at improving the situation of women in the world. Shepherd (2008a, 383) advocates for “paying attention to the discursive terrain of international institutions” to see the ways that their notions of gender are “product/productive of a particular configuration of political authority and legitimacy that can, and should, be challenged.” In other words, Shepherd (2008a, 2008b) argues that not all legislation promoting women’s rights constitutes progress toward gender equality, in part because such legislation itself configures power/authority in gendered ways. Shepherd (2008a) contends that particular discourses of gender and of institutional authority actually constitute and reconstitute both feminized subjects and governmental structures entitled to interfere with them. ⁶

At first glance, a dialogue between these perspectives seems difficult if possible. Shepherd’s article existed in the public sphere for Cole to cite or discuss, and predecessors to Cole’s work (e.g., Melander 2005) existed for Shepherd to engage. Shepherd’s article seems to critique Cole’s perspective, where Cole’s methodology appears to exclude the possibility of discussing the sort of endogeneity of gender inequality that Shepherd implies. A dialogical juxtaposition of these perspectives need not ignore, nor even minimize, these differences. At the same time, Cole’s data provide potential support for Shepherd’s argument, and Shepherd’s analysis provides both explanatory leverage and methodological critique for Cole’s research and its findings.

Cole (2013, 247) gives a procedural explanation for his finding that CEDAW passage increases women’s political rights while having a neutral effect on economic rights and a slightly negative effect on social rights: “some rights, it would seem, are simply easier to implement than others.” Likewise, Cole optimistically frames his finding that CEDAW’s intended effects are seen in increased percentages of female legislators but not in legal quotas to ensure that representation: “ratification of an international treaty produced positive outcomes without an intervening change in formal domestic policies.” ⁷ Shepherd’s (2008a, 2008b, 390) analysis suggests an alternative explanation: that a particular account of what women are underlies policy-making—an account which casts women as passive, provides only for a benign notion of women’s agency when such agency is imagined as possible, and assumes the “translatability of women to gender.” Extrapolating Shepherd’s gender theorizing to Cole’s sex data suggests that women’s political representation progresses because objects of women/gender/governance like CEDAW and UNSC 1325 present an idealized, positive, feminized understanding of women which make their involvement in governance appealing, while women’s economic rights do not improve and their social situation suffers because that idealized image makes invisible the complexities, difficulties, and faults of individual women and the gendered political contexts in which they attempt to navigate their experience. In other words, Shepherd’s (2008a) article can be read to predict Cole’s (2013) results, and provide a contextualized account of them. Taking Shepherd’s argument seriously would enrich Cole’s conclusions, and Shepherd’s argument could leverage Cole’s data as an example of the result of gendered representation in global politics.

Shepherd’s (2008a) argument could be used to contend that extensions of Cole’s (2013) work should analyze gender-essentialist representations of women in governance documents and discourses as an intervening variable to look to understand the multidirectionality of causal relationships. Augmented in this way, Cole’s (2013) analyses could be used to show how the conflation of sex/gender, and the essentialized association of women/femininity, produce mixed results for state feminist, ⁸ and international feminist ⁹ policy.

Sex, Gender, and Terrorism

Another possible dialogue can be found between Bradley Thayer and Valerie Hudson’s (2010) International Security article “Sex and the Shaheed” and Caron Gentry’s (2015) Critical Studies on Terrorism article “Epistemological Failures: Everyday Terrorism in the West.” Unlike the example above, where neither author acknowledges them other, Hudson et al. (2012) other work is the subject of critique in Gentry’s (2015) article—where Gentry (2015) like True (2015) puts together a criticism of Sex and World Peace (Hudson et al. 2012) on the basis of the raced and gendered blindnesses in its evidence suggestion. For our purposes, we leave aside that rehearsed argument for a different conversation: one concerning the relationship between terrorist violence and intimate relations. Each of these articles has an explicit engagement with that question, and we argue that their very different takes would benefit from a dialogue that makes the pieces more than a sum of their parts.

Thayer and Hudson (2010) make the argument that intimate relations cause (Islamic) terrorism. Particularly, they emphasize “high levels of gender differentiation, comparatively high levels of polygyny, and obstructed marriage markets” as factors that must be understood to see why (Islamic) “young adult males” engage in suicide terrorism (Thayer and Hudson 2010, 40). Gentry (2015, 1), on the other hand, argues that intimate relations are terrorism, where everyday domestic violence constitutes a regime of terror. Gentry observes (2015, 1-2), however, that the everyday terror of domestic violence is often recognized by the West in places that Westerners see as savage/outside of Western civilizations while remaining invisible in the West to the West. At first glance, these articles are about different things—Thayer and Hudson (2010) are talking about suicide bombing, while Gentry is talking about in-home violence between intimate partners. They also differ significantly ontologically, where Thayer and Hudson (2010) take a life sciences approach to suggest the naturalness of heterosexuality, sexual needs, and sex differentiation, and Gentry (2015) takes a postcolonial feminist approach to see state and gender identities as coconstituted by intimate and international violence. Finally, they differ epistemologically, where Thayer and Hudson (2010) are interested in the causes of terrorism, and Gentry (2015) is interested in the representations of terrorisms.

Still, we think that these perspectives, which both discuss gender and terrorism in the international arena (if very differently), can be usefully brought into dialogue. In important ways, Gentry’s (2015) analysis can be read as a critique of Thayer and Hudson’s (2010) framework and conclusions, though Gentry does not explicitly make such a critique. Gentry’s (2015) piece might critique Thayer and Hudson’s (2010) in two main ways. First, Gentry’s analysis of the “discursive screens” which constitute certain gendered images (e.g., the prevalence of everyday terrorism outside the West) as possible and certain gendered images (e.g., the prevalence of everyday terrorism in the West) impossible can be read into seeing the blind spots that make Thayer and Hudson’s sex-driven analysis of gender and terrorism possible—particularly that of the female suicide bomber. If Thayer and Hudson (2010) argue that young Islamic men engage in suicide terrorism in part because of the unavailability of both sexual release and male adulthood in the form of marriage, their analysis renders causally impossible the significant number of women who engage in suicide terrorism. Hudson and Thayer also engage the discursive screen of the West/non-West dichotomy in gender relations (where the West is presumed to treat “their women” well and the non-West is presumed to treat “their women” poorly), such that their frame is to leverage that difference to explain other behavior, presuming such a difference exists. Gentry (2015) could be read as suggesting that this sort of analysis relies as heavily on gendered Orientalism as it does on what happens between men and women in the Islamic world.

The potential for dialogue between these pieces, though, is not limited to a one-directional critique from Gentry’s (2015) work toward Thayer and Hudson’s (2010). ¹⁰ Thayer and Hudson (2010, 43) suggest that dominance hierarchies are “accompanied by and maintained through the use of violence” which is coconstitutive with “a concomitant feeling of empowerment.” While Thayer and Hudson (2010) use this to analyze a competition among young males for heterosexual sex and omit women from dominance hierarchies, ¹¹ thinking about the violent enforcement of dominance would add dimensionality to Gentry’s analysis. Framing everyday terrorism as the violent enforcement of gender dominance hierarchies might augment Gentry’s (2015, 18, emphasis in original) ability to understand “everyday terrorism as a security concern in every place in the world.” If the source of the security threat of intimate/everyday terrorism is the violent enforcement of gender dominance, then it is part of the assemblage of violences that come from gender subordination, and can be contextualized as such. Framing the visibility of everyday terrorism in the non-West and the invisibility of everyday terrorism as the West as the violent enforcement of dominance hierarchies among states and cultures in the international arena might help Gentry’s (2015, 18) analysis situate the impacts and self-reifying nature of the gender/race hierarchies about everyday terrorism in a broader context of international politics.

This dialogue is less literal than the others—we are arguing that Gentry’s (2015) work shows omissions in Thayer and Hudson’s (2010) gender analysis that render their conclusions problematic, and that Thayer and Hudson’s (2010) work on dominance hierarchies could be used to provide an additional layer of explanation for Gentry’s (2015) reading of the reasons for and impacts of particular exclusive representations of everyday terrorisms. While the ideas in the articles serve as correctives to each other, they each do so indirectly. Where the other dialogues that we have presented are places where the work would benefit from citing and engaging with the other piece, this is one where each piece might be revised by taking account of the substance of the other, making each stronger for what it could directly borrow from the other.

Envisioning Dialogues

The complementarity of this work, then, is neither straightforward (where the work can be cleanly paired) nor chronologically linear (where positivist gender and IR research is the next step after postpositivist gender and IR research). Instead, it relies on understanding epistemological and ontological differences, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Moving away from a standard that judges postpositivist work only by its utility to generate positivist work broadens our understanding of gender and IR. For example, postcolonial feminists (Chowdhry and Nair 2002; Marchand and Runyan 2011; Agathangelou and Ling 2004) highlight the intersection of race and gender in global politics as a unique kind of discrimination rather than an additive relationship between sex discrimination and race discrimination. Feminist scholarship on marginalized identities (D’Costa 2006; Lee-Koo and D’Costa 2008; Teaiwa 2001) examines the ways that the identity difference between the researched and the researcher shapes the ways the researcher understands the subject. Some ethnographic field researchers in conflict zones analyze content of privileged knowledge derived from feeling safe and outside of war as compared to the experience of people whose lives are constantly endangered, especially in gendered ways (Sylvester and Parashar 2009; Parashar 2013a; Park-Kang 2015). Other feminist scholars explore (in)security as felt, smelled, tasted, and experienced (e.g., Alexander 2010). Still others extend gender analysis to include sexuality analysis, advocating queer theorizing for questions of global politics and security (e.g., Weber 1999, 2016; Sjoberg and Weber 2014; Picq and Thiel 2015; Wilkinson and Langlois 2014). A broader, more careful approach to synthesis can explore these more nuanced causal and constitutive connections between sex, gender, and global social and political relations.

Dialogue among “positivist” and “nonpositivist” research should cross not only methodological and epistemological differences but also ontological and political ones. We object to Reiter’s reduction of scholarship to a positivist/nonpositivist dichotomy because it misses the most important substantive distinctions in gender/IR research. The tradition Reiter calls “nonpositivist” is explicitly feminist, bringing ontological and political commitments that shape its epistemological approaches. Any complementarity across gender and IR research cannot be based merely on agreement or similarity. It must acknowledge contributions, dialogue across disagreements, and recognize the ability of different types of work to provide different types of information. Such synergies ultimately provide a fuller understanding of gender and IR.