Abstract
In 2001, Sandra Whitworth commented that while critical and feminist theories of International Relations had made an important contribution to the discipline by opening up what counts as the subject matter of international relations (IR), those same theories “have been almost completely silent on theorizing about or thinking through the political implications of conducting research on so-called marginalized communities.” Whitworth hoped to contribute to discussion about “what happens” when feminist IR theorists “go out into the world and actually talk to the people they study.”1 Five years earlier and writing from an interdisciplinary feminist perspective, Diane Wolf expressed her own dilemmas about aspects of the research process that she experienced whilst conducting fieldwork in Java.2 She encouraged others to write about “the secrets of fieldwork, things that people don’t talk about”3 particularly in relation to research that crossed national, cultural, gender, and class boundaries in the dynamic between researcher and research subject. A recent volume devoted to methodological issues attempts to fill the gap in “scholarly work that discusses how IR feminist research is conducted”4 and includes insightful reflections upon fieldwork in particular.5 Notwithstanding these efforts and the increasing recognition of feminist approaches to IR in general, sustained analysis of feminist methodologies in practice remain few in number within the discipline.
My thanks to the people in Peshawar who generously and patiently shared their time and stories with me. I am grateful to Mary O’Kane, Kim Huynh, Katrina Lee-Koo, and Shakira Hussein for reading earlier drafts of this chapter and for their thoughtful comments and suggestions, and to Bina D’Costa for encouraging me to write about my fieldwork.
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Notes
Sandra Whitworth, “The Practice, and Praxis, of Feminist Research in International Relations,” in Critical Theory and World Politics, ed. Richard W. Jones (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), 149.
Diane L. Wolf, “Preface,” in Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, ed. Diane L. Wolf (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), ix–x; idem, “Situating Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork,” 12.
Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, “Feminist Methodologies for International Relations,” in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, ed. Brooke A. Ackerly, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2.
See, for example, Navnita Chadha Behera, “Introduction,” in Gender, Conflict and Migration, ed. Navnita Chadha Behera (New Delhi: Sage, 2006), 47–50;
J. Ann Tickner, “What Is Your Research Program? Some Feminist Answers to International Relations Methodological Questions,” International Studies Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2005): 4–10.
Sandra Harding, “Introduction: Is There a Feminist Method?” in Feminism and Methodology, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 9.
See in particular Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), especially chapter 1;
Anne Sisson Runyan and V. Spike Peterson, “The Radical Future of Realism: Feminist Subversions of IR Theory,” Alternatives 16 (1991): 68–72;
Rebecca Grant, “The Sources of Gender Bias in International Relations Theory,” in Gender and International Relations, ed. Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland (Buckingham: The Millennium Publishing Group, 1991), 11–17.
Christine Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Domestic Workers and the Malaysian “Modernity Project” (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
Saskia Sassen, Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: The New Press, 1998), chapters 2 and 3;
Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2000), chapter 6;
V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Reurriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (London: Routledge, 2003);
Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 185–207.
On the construction of refugee identity as an instrument of statecraft see Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), chapter 1.
On political passivity as a central component of statist refugee identity see Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (New York: Routledge, 2006), chapter 5.
On this point see also Shahnaz Khan, “Reconfiguring the Native Informant: Positionality in the Global Age,” Signs 30, no. 4 (2005): 2026.
Sandra Harding and Kathryn Norberg, “New Feminist Approaches to Social Science Methodologies: An Introduction,” Signs 30, no. 4 (2005): 2011.
Jayati Lal, “Situating Locations: The Politics of Self, Identity, And ‘Other’ In Living and Writing the Text,” in Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, ed. Diane L. Wolf (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 196.
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© 2009 Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo
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McNevin, A. (2009). Confessions of a Failed Feminist IR Scholar. 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_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617742_7
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