Abstract
This chapter1 reflects on a life lived in and around international relations, a life lived in and out of place. It does so in the context of both the discipline of International Relations (IR), and the region called the Asia-Pacific.2 It asks what significance biography and nationality play in shaping academic research and personal politics; in particular, what it means to do feminist IR as an Australian, in the context of Asia and the Pacific.3 Identity thus figures centrally—identity of the discipline and of feminist IR, and of feminism in Australia, in the region, and the world. So, too, does the notion of a feminist politics of location,4 as I ask what pursuing feminism as an engaged practice means in terms of a feminist politics of region, at a time when domination relations operate so relentlessly in anti-feminist, militaristic, and exploitative ways.
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Notes
Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (New York: Norton, 1986); for an earlier attempt to develop such a politics, see
Jindy Pettman, “Towards a (Personal) Politics of Location,” Studies in Continuing Education 13, no. 2 (1991): 153–66;
Jindy Pettman, “Transcending National Identity: the Global Political Economy of Gender and Class,” in International Relations: Still an American Social Science?, ed. Robert Crawford and Darryl Jarvis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 255–74.
This language speaks to painful contests around settlement, versus invasion. I use the expression settler state here to link Australia’s experiences to colonial relations internationally. See Jindy Pettman, “Australia,” in Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class, ed. Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis (Sage, London, 1995): 65–94.
Overseas military adventures have long signaled Australia’s drive for state security through foreign, imperial connections, first to Britain and then to the United States and the priority given to western allegiance and alliances. Contests around Australian identity are often presented as a conflict between history (white, western, capitalist, and democratic) and geography (in Asia and the Pacific). There have been moments of more internationalist bent, and longer times when attention to the region is generated by concerns strategic or economic, but always within a western alliance structure, that anchors identity and security. See Jindy Pettman, “A Feminist Perspective on Australia in Asia,” in Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, ed. John Docker and Gerard Fischer (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000), 143–57;
Anthony Burke, In Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Annandale: Pluto Press, 2001).
Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1956);
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991, originally published 1957);
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967).
Jindy Pettman, “Adaptation in Education in Papua New Guinea,” The South Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 9, no. 1 (1981): 55–60.
Until that time, Aboriginal studies were the preserve of anthropology and focused on traditional Aboriginal societies. See David Hollinsworth, Race and Racism in Australia, 2nd edition (Katoomba, NSW: Social Sciences, 1998).
Margaret Tucker, If Everyone Cared: An Autobiography (Melbourne: Grosvenor Press, 1987);
Jackie Huggins and Rita Huggins, Auntie Rita (Aboriginal Studies Press: Canberra, 1994);
HREOC, Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: HREOC, 1997).
Sophie Watson, ed., Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990).
Ann Curthoys, For and Against Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989).
A clear demonstration of feminist differences around indigenous issues emerged in furious Aboriginal women’s response to a provocative intervention by Di Bell. See Jan Larbalestier, “The Politics of Representation: Aboriginal Women and Feminism,” Anthropolgoical Forum 6, no. 2 (1990): 143–57;
Jindy Pettman, “Gendered Knowledges: Aboriginal Women and the Politics of Feminism,” Journal of Australian Studies, no. 35 (1992): 120–31.
Jindy Pettman and Helen Meekosha, “Beyond Category Politics,” Hecate, 17, no. 2 (1991): 75–92.
Notably Gloria Hull, et al., ed., All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave (New York: Feminist Press, 1982);
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzadlua, ed., This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour (New York: Kitchen Table 1983).
See for an Australian example, Gillian Bottomley, Marie de Lepervanche and Jean Martin, ed., Intersexions: Gender/Class/Culture/Ethnicity (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991).
More recently, see Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix, “Ain’t I a Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 5, no. 3 (2004): 75–86.
For a retrospective on the impact of This Bridge in North American context, see M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 257–86.
Pettman, “Towards a (Personal) Politics of Location”; Jindy Pettman, Living in the Margins: Racism, Sexism and Feminism in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992); Pettman, “Transcending National Identity.”
Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Bases and Beaches: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (London: Pandora, 1990).
Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: a feminist international politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin; London: Routledge, 1996).
Peggy Antrobus, The Global Women’s Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies (London: Zed Books, 2004);
Jindy Pettman, “Global Politics and Transnational Feminisms,” in Feminist Politics, Activism and Vision: Local and Global Challenges, ed. Luciana Ricciutelli, Angela Miles, and Margaret H. McFadden (London: Zed Books, 2005), 49–63.
Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, ed., Rethinking the ‘Man’ Question: Sex, Gender and Violence in International Relations (London, Zed Books, 2008).
Marianne Marchand and Ann Sisson Runyan, ed., Gender and Global Restructuring (London: Routledge, 2000). I was tracing globalization through gendered migration for sex and service, focusing on flows from poorer south and southeast Asian states to richer Asian and Middle Eastern states, and on women’s organizing and feminist responses to these women on the move.
Jindy Pettman, “International Sex and Service,” in Globalization: Theory and Practice, 2nd ed., ed. Eleonore Kofman and Gillian Youngs (Continuum, 2003), 158–72;
and Jindy Pettman “Women on the Move: Globalization and Labour Migration from South and Southeast Asian states,” Global Society 12, no. 3 (1998): 389–403.
There is a voluminous feminist IR literature elaborating this position. For an early example, see Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs 12, no. 41(1987): 687–718;
and recently, Laura Sjoberg, “Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle: Why Gender Analysis Needs Feminism,” International Studies Quarterly 50, no. 4 (2006): 889–910.
As elsewhere in this chapter, the brief summary of a crisis and response gives little sense of the politics—including gender politics—involved; the gender politics of the intervention included a rhetorical and mostly marginalized policy attention to gender, Hilary Charlesworth and Mary Wood, “‘Mainstreaming Gender’ in International Peace and Security: East Timor,” Yale Journal of International Law, 26 (2001): 313–17; see also Charlesworth, and Hall and True chapters in this collection; The Globalism Institute RMIT compilation of gender resources on Timor-Leste, http://www.timor-leste.org/gender.html (accessed March 22, 2008).
Currently Australia has nearly 3,000 military personnel serving overseas, including 1,400 in Iraq, 500 in Afghanistan, 800 in East Timor, and 140 in the Solomon Islands, The Weekend Australian (January 20–21, 2007): 8. The Australian announced, “the Australian Digger—the men and women of the Australian Defense Force who we are proud to collectively name recipients of the Weekend Australian’s 2006 Australian of the Year.” The supporting editorial noted that our diggers are “providing forward defense of our democracy against the threat of terror attack” (18). The new Labor government is planning to withdraw combat troops though not trainers and other support in Iraq, and taking up a more internationalist and less militarist stance overall.
Jindy Pettman, “Feminist International Relations Post 9/11,” Brown Journal of World Affairs X, Issue. 2 (2004): 85–96; John Birmingham, “A Time for War: Australia as a Military Power,” Quarterly Essay, no. 20 (2005);
Anthony Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against the Other (Oxon: Routledge, 2007).
Something of the shift is indicated when the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs was renamed the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, and the further tightening of citizenship tests. The common experience of Anglo-American liberal democracies is clear, see for example Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel, ed. (En)Gendering the War on Terror (Aldershot: Ashgate 2006).
International Feminist Journal of Politics, “Forum: The Events of 11 September 2001 and Beyond,” 4, no. 1 (2002): 95–115; “September 11 and its Aftermath: Movement Statements,” in Inter-Asian Cultural Studies “September 11 and its Aftermath: Movement Statements,” 3, no. 1 (2002): 121–33; Ammu Joseph and Kalpana Sharma, ed., Terror, Counter Terror Women Speak Out (London: Zed Books, 2003); “Roundtable: “Gender and September 11,” in Signs “Roundtable: Gender and September 11,” 28, no. 1 (2002): 431–80; Pettman, “Feminist International Relations After 9/11.” Much has followed; see, for example, Hunt and Rygiel, ed., (En)Gendering the War on Terror; the theme issue on “Feminist International Relations in the Age of the War on Terror: Ideologies, Religions and Conflict,” in International Feminist Journal of Politics 8, no. 1 (2006); the special issue on “Gender Violence and Hegemonic Projects,” in International Feminist Journal of Politics 8, no. 4 (2006).
Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Krista Hunt and Kim Rygiel, “(En)Gendered War Stories and Camouflaged Politics,” in Hunt and Rygiel, ed. (En)Gendering the War on Terror, 1–24.
Arif Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional Structure,” Journal of World History 3, no. 1 (1992): 55–79; Claire Slatter and Yvonne Underhill in this collection.
An exception was the 2005 AWID Bangkok conference, where Pacific women were speakers at the opening and closing plenaries, and Pacific panels and the Pacific women poets readings were well attended, see Vanessa Griffen, “Local and Global Women’s Rights in the Pacific,” Development 49, no. 1 (2006): 108–12.
Greg Fry, “Framing the Islands: Knowledge and Power in Changing Australian Images of ‘the South Pacific,’” Contemporary Pacific 9, no. 2 (1997): 305–44;
see also E. Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 148–61.
Claire Slatter, “Tensions in Activism: Navigating the Global Spaces at the Intersections of State/Civil Society and Gender/Economic Justice,” (paper presented to the Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Feminist Revisions of the International workshop, Australian National University, Canberra, 2001).
For a report on this conference, see Nicole George, “Women’s Re-Visions of Globalization: Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Feminist Revisions of the International Workshop,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4, no. 2 (2002): 268–77. Some of the most important feminist analysis and advocacy has long come from DAWN, a leading southern-based feminist network. From the mid-1980s, DAWN activists were amongst those who tracked intensifying neoliberalism and restructuring on the one hand and growing and deeply anti-feminist identity movements on the other, resisting feminist gains and claims. The DAWN 2001 video and accompanying material, “The Marketization of Governance,” is an incisive and affecting critique of neoliberalism and its gendered effects.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anti-capitalist Struggles,” Signs 28, no. 2 (2003): 499–537.
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© 2009 Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo
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Pettman, J. (2009). A Feminist Politics of Region?. In: D’Costa, B., Lee-Koo, K. (eds) Gender and Global Politics in the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617742_13
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