Conversation

Cristina Masters (CM): The articles in this forum speak to how influential and inspiring your work is for scholars in the discipline of International Relations (IR), not least feminist scholars. Particularly, I think, for encouraging us to (re)think and (re)work with deeply familiar ‘things’ in deeply unusual – yet troublingly fecund – ways. Blood, for example, comes up quite frequently in your writing on methodology, even though it appears, as you say, an ‘unlikely candidate for methodological use’.Footnote ¹ What is so promising about blood for making sense of global politics?

Marysia Zalewski (MZ): When I think about some of the major concerns we have about ‘global politics’ – dying, destruction, violence, pain (however these manifest and whatever we think the causes are) – my sense is that conventional methodological expectations take us very far away from these fleshly raw brutalities. Trying to be a ‘good methodologist’ always moved me further and further away. When I write about blood and all the manifold ways it is gendered, sexualised, and raced, and how blood is like gender in its fluidity and slipperiness and its absolute necessity to everyone, it helps me keep visualising the embodied violences of global politics. It helps me to keep off the beaten track of disciplinary correctness and familiarity – which I think only leads to paths of more and more violence. Toni Morrison articulates this orientation in reference to ‘The Dead of September 11’, along these lines: ‘speaking to the broken and dead is too difficult for a mouthful of blood’.Footnote ² Blood reminds us we are all in relationship with each other and perhaps that we all have blood on our hands.

CM: A ‘mouthful of blood’ is so visceral and evocative of the need (maybe even demand) to write differently. Shine Choi says your work ‘addresses matters of style, that is, questions of language and representation that foreground the invisible yet so palpable aspects of how meanings circulate’.Footnote ³ Anne Runyan refers to your ‘style of enquiry and writing as constituting continual interventions into foreclosing narratives and easy conclusions’.Footnote ⁴ There is, undoubtedly, something unique about your ‘style’ of engagement, particularly how you work with varied and eclectic aesthetic artefacts that are affectively saturated. On the page you have an uncanny knack for bringing to life the senses – when I read your work, I can feel it. Here I'm thinking of the two Carries (in Stephen King's novel and Homeland and more blood!) in your chapter in Emotions, Politics & War where you make the frenzy and quiet rage of these characters palpable and political;Footnote ⁵ the documentary film UNWATCHABLE Footnote ⁶ in your chapter in Visual Global Politics where sexual violence viscerally mars the bucolic setting of the West, all the while still peddling in lily white colonial tropes;Footnote ⁷ and the cover art of Exquisite Corpse with its beautifully strange gendered hauntings.Footnote ⁸ It's all so sensual! What is it about aesthetic artefacts that help (and/or) prompt your (bloody) thinking?

MZ: The need for constant disruptive thinking to help keep off the comforting conventional path has led me more and more to the realm of aesthetics, including fiction, film, theatre, and art. For me, artistic forms shower us with gifts to help think, and more importantly to help unthink and unmake. Let me link this to our discussion of blood earlier, and offer some thoughts from a recent production I saw of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.Footnote ⁹ In this production, Mary Shelley had become part of the play itself; she moves around the set with her table, her notebook and her pen, and we witness her tussling with her ideas and struggling with her ‘inability’ to write and to keep hold of what she is thinking. But as she gets further into the narrative of her ‘monster’, in some anguish she cries out, ‘Oh for a bridge of words! For this nightmare is woven through my imagination like my own blood!’ And her words arrive.

This invoked an image of the messy methodological, imaginative, and corporeal trails we are always working through, with and against to produce our words. Writing is such a struggle. For me, artistic forms and their aesthetics have become the breath of my thinking and writing. Though I think of (the) aesthetic as much more and other than art, film, or fiction – but crucially about those things, feelings, senses, half lost scraps of questions, and confusions – these and so many more like them touch us all through the days, weeks, years – constantly. Yet we mostly forget them, or perhaps are unable to grasp hold of them. In a disciplinary sense we have no time or space for them – conventional (and much critical) methodologising and theorising works so hard to push this mess, this detritus away. For me, feminist theory offers strands of help for grasping some of these trails – at least if we imagine the possibilities of feminist theory as Hilde Hein does, ‘feminist theory works with that which [philosophy] pronounces inessential, contingent and superfluous. This is the domain of the aesthetic.’Footnote ¹⁰

Going back to the examples of my writing that you mention, Cristina, trying to think and write about emotion, politics, and war – I feel the disordered sensate sinews between my daughters, a colleague's off the cuff comment about a TV show, and about two women – my two CarriesFootnote ¹¹ – whose feminised blood and pain connects and breaks them over feminist decades. Or the haunting suspiciousness of Dorothea Tanning's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik Footnote ¹² with that enticing barely open door – my own words arrive then. I don't quite know how a narrative emerges from this, but I know that it is important to keep writing with the feeling. The barriers are often painful though – feminism always brings pain – as is trying to keep astride the very faintly worn trail of feminist radical possibilities. This all may seem unsettling, but to invoke Toni Morrison again, ‘writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look … can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma in the population, a coma despots call peace, and they staunch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to’.Footnote ¹³ Don't we want to staunch the flow of blood? And the methodological coma?

CM: You would certainly think so, but the flow of blood hasn't been staunched by the reams of pages written in the discipline. How and for whom we write, the questions begged and questions your work has been deeply concerned with. The ‘how’, in particular. I think it's safe to say that your work is immersed in questions of methodology. Why does paying such close and careful attention to method/ology matter for feminist politics?

MZ: Questions about methodology are always difficult to answer, even though I am always writing and thinking about method/ology, constantly questioning what it is, what it means, and how it is used. Kath Weston is always helpful to read when thinking about method/ology, and certainly about the tone or implicit weight of questions posed in conventional disciplinary terms. She writes: ‘One is asked within a certain tone of voice, an almost imperceptible sigh of relief that the one asking is not the one answering: the sound also of a powerful demand to know … capturing in its delivery the authority of the interrogator.’Footnote ¹⁴ I bore the weight of this kind of interrogation when I began researching feminism and global politics, this really mattered to me in part because it appeared to me there was a great deal at stake if I got the answer ‘wrong’. I learned that in conventional disciplinary confines, most any of the feminist answers, except perhaps those received as non-threatening, were most likely ‘wrong’ according to those conventional standards. This, I would say, remains the case. Though, I hasten to add, this does not mean feminist answers are ‘wrong’ per se, but rather that the discipline consistently positions feminist work as ‘never right enough’, as always supplementary, which of course keeps disciplines ‘safe’.

CM: Violence is another leitmotif of your research. In Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse,Footnote ¹⁵ you take what you call a ‘distracted detour around, through and aside feminist international relations’ because of your interest in the ‘brutal fecundity of violence’.Footnote ¹⁶ You argue that violence – how we learn about it, what we think it is or is not, how we (learn to) respond to it – is ‘such as a slippery concept’ and yet time and again we think we can pin it down, control it, say ‘That's it!’ and bring it to an end. Violence for you, and for Anne Sisson Runyan and discussed in her article in this forum, is both destructive and productive. How is feminism implicated in the many ‘trails of blood’ marking our weighty present?

MZ: There are so many ways we could think about the idea of feminism being violent and bloody – we might start by asking ‘How could it not be violent’? How could any feminist idea not have the aim of doing violence to patriarchal structures, thinking, and acting? To tear down the cruel edifices of misogyny that blights so many lives, and brutally thwarts possibilities of other ways to live – again and again and again? Epistemological violence is perhaps a safer, more palatable way to articulate this. And we surely know (and feel) how all but the safest and most methodologically and disciplinarily measured forms of feminist work is so regularly felt and sensed as violence, as violating by hegemons? The persistent feminist insistence that traditional white male entitlement needs to be curtailed, even ended: how radically sounding the latter remains. Think of the spluttering white masculinist wrath exhibited by Kavanaugh in the Ford-Kavanaugh US Senate judicial hearing in 2018.Footnote ¹⁷ Or indeed of any of the white male supremacists currently stalking the global political landscape. Or when teaching ‘feminist IR’ and mention is made of how the women protesting at the Greenham Common airbase in the 1980s tied used bloody tampons on the fences of the missile bases – audible shudders of disgust are never absent. The violating trail of feminised/feminist blood is never far away from high politics.

Though perhaps this is too much, too hard to hear. And if all theorising and political activities are violating in some measure – why draw stark attention to feminisms’ violence? Is this giving too much away about feminism? Being too brutally honest? Too unpalatable for disciplinary and institutionalised tastes? Perhaps the answers to these questions are less interesting than their indication of the manoeuvres that non-mainstream and non-normative scholars have to perform to make their work acceptable. In what form can postcolonial or critical feminist work ‘appear’ for example? Though is this really the intention of such work? We have to keep trying to be courageous, I think.

I'm reminded of one of the videos clips of Toni Morrison, the one in which the white female interviewer asks her if she was ever going to centre white people in her writing. One can see the moment of shock in Morrison's face just before she responds by saying, ‘You can't understand how powerfully racist that question is, can you?’Footnote ¹⁸ This clip was among the things (books, articles, films) that I recently revisited in a search for inspiration and reprieve from a local space of muscular resistance to difference that had shocked me. I felt stupid and naïve in my shock – wasn't I aware enough to expect this daily occurrence and thus not be surprised? Yet at the very start of that clip Morrison says we should always be surprised at acts of discrimination; at racism, at sexism. If we are not, perhaps we have become complacent; they should be shocking. And just today as I write, US World Cup-winning football player Megan Rapinoe is quoted as saying, ‘If there's ever an instance of racism, if every single player on the field is not outraged, then to me they're part of the problem.’Footnote ¹⁹ The circular and interweaving of the work of violence in, with and against feminism; in with and against anti-racism – the fleeting visibilities/invisibilities – all speaks to how much work there remains to do and keep doing.

CM: In her article in this forum, Elisabeth Prügl quite powerfully traces your thinking over time.Footnote ²⁰ For example, she excavates your defence of feminist standpoint theory in direct challenge to Robert Keohane's heavy-handed attempt to discipline IR feminists.Footnote ²¹ She also digs up one of your even earlier pieces where you grapple with the ‘corrupting influence’ of postmodern theory.Footnote ²² How has this made you think about your ‘thinking’ over the last three decades?

MZ: The passion and the struggle are still much the same actually – in fact the struggle with words is harder. Of course, the idea of me writing about the ‘seductions of postmodernism’ does make me smile a little! Though when I wrote that, I had just recently learned (academically/intellectually speaking) about the overwhelming dominance of men and masculinist thought in creating knowledge, truth, reality, so I was quickly very sure that it was important to hold onto the truth of woman – politically and epistemologically. ‘Male postmodernist’ pronouncements about ‘woman as fiction’ certainly did not appeal to me then. Male pronouncements generally are even more unappealing to me now, so I tend not to look there anymore, though of course they are ferociously unavoidable in the everyday. But all my reading, thinking, seeing, looking, sensing, wondering, feeling around woman, feminism, theory, truth, violence, resistance, and more – I cannot not ‘know’ that there is ‘no such thing as woman’ (or anything) in any essential sense. Yet all those ongoing battles of all kinds – materially, psychically, scientifically, medically, culturally, epistemologically (the list is endless) – to place woman, to keep her in ‘some’ place. Or man of course, if very differently. These battles are relentless. Also relentless is the resurgence – time and time again in all its unlinearity – of very traditional forms and bodies rising to the surface of power and privilege. But I love the idea of ‘digging up’ one of my earlier pieces of writing! Anne Sisson Runyan and I have recently written on haunting and ‘digging up ghosts from/of the “past”’.Footnote ²³ None of the ‘old/past’ thoughts die – but how they return or revive is the thing to track.

CM: In the context of this long view of your scholarship, what do you think is the most pressing issue for feminists to take on in our historical present? Or what is being avoided that urgently needs feminist ‘violence’, as you so viscerally put it?

MZ: Everything! And I don't mean this flippantly, or because it is always an impossible challenge to choose the most pressing issue (though it is). But I say ‘everything’ because feminist theory/thinking (in all its pluralities, permutations, and contradictions) has only begun to touch the surface. Or one might say is persistently pushed to remain on the surface. One might think of IR theory or global political leadership practices as examples of this persistent pushing. But of course the list of issues of high importance on the contemporary global political landscape are all ripe for feminist attention – and feminists do persistently pay attention to all of them, if oftentimes this work goes unnoticed. Why, for example, isn't feminist scholarship at the top of the theorising pile in relation to climate change?Footnote ²⁴ Too grand a claim for the worth of feminist thought? I don't think so.Footnote ²⁵

CM: Maybe feminism isn't on the top of the pile because we are too busy trying to be respectable, accommodating, professional? A demand even more pressing in our institutional masculinised, colonial auditing cultures – the UK's REF being a stark current example. In an interview about her latest book, The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, Mona EltahawyFootnote ²⁶ argues that the time for ‘being civil, peaceful and politics is over’ and states, ‘I want patriarchy to fear women.’ This seems to run counter to Jane Parpart's discussion in her article in this forum about silence ‘as an essential survival strategy, a source of comfort and a crucial mechanism for dealing with hostile and often dangerous environments’.Footnote ²⁷ How might we think these together and heed Eltahawy, and many other feminists, particularly black feminists, that the time to be ‘happy, clappy, fun’ feminists and women is over?

MZ: There are a lot of different and really important issues wrapped up in your questions here. Thinking first about the idea and act of silence that Jane speaks to – this actually came up in a conversation I had this morning with a colleague/friend in another country. We were sharing stories about how individually facing up to sexism and racism (to give just two names of ongoing discrimination), and how calling it out in our locales can be overwhelming. Withdrawing – either by not calling out the work of racism or sexism, or by physically removing oneself, even for a while, is very necessary in order for us to continue; to survive. So I agree absolutely that silence and withdrawal remain crucial mechanisms for dealing with the hostilities of white heteropatriarchy even as the latter persistently appears in almost benign forms in our institutions. Yet at the same time, I have always worked with the idea of feminism as an insistent rather than an accommodating force. And I wonder about the thought of wanting patriarchy to fear women. Perhaps the wanting isn't necessary as this fear is ever present and in part responsible for the violence meted out to women, especially those who keep brazenly moving out of their ‘assigned places’. And we know very well that anger in women is heard, felt and understood very differently to anger in men. And race, class, and ethnicity snakes through this in deeply insidious ways.

As to the ‘happy clappy fun feminists’ – humour as political force or as a feminist tactic is important. I think of satire here, simply hearing and laughing at those skilled in the art of poking fun at patriarchy, in cultural sites where this is possible, this offers literal physical and emotional release. Like silence, feminist humour is a vital space. This is different to tirelessly (understood in a pejorative sense) working to make feminism palatable and safe. Palatable and safe for whom?

CM: Those who encounter your work, Marysia, will most certainly not find palatable safety and zones of familiar comfort. Thank you for this. Your words arrive, they unsettle and make uncomfortable – bloody, disordered sensate sinews of thinking with the ‘inessential, contingent and superfluous’ – and they have inspired and continue to inspire feminist thinking in the discipline. If it isn't already, your scholarship should be essential reading for students of global politics.

Postscript

CM & MZ: As we submit the final edits for this conversation for this forum, we find ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic. What were to be minor edits now feel like climbing a steep hill, demanding an ability to concentrate, which is now elusive. Many are dead, many more will die in the coming weeks and months. These (slow-fast) deaths won't simply happen because of the severity of the coronavirus, but as much, if not more so, because of the many bloody obscenities of white,Footnote ²⁸ elite heteropatriarchal capitalisms that produce and rely on precarious and disposable lives. Social distancing has made more visible the racialised, gendered, and classed spaces between us. The architectures of violent and bloody inequalities laid bare, the gendered and racialised economies of care, work, the home, and surviving – all now on naked display – at least to those who care to look. For some of us lucky enough to have employment, some income, a roof over our heads, and well-stocked kitchens, lockdown might not feel so bad. It might even feel pretty ‘cosy’, if still anxious, uncertain, disorienting, a weight pressing down on us. For many more, lockdown or social distancing is a privileged luxury. In the week beginning 6 April 2020, BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire had the UK's national domestic abuse helpline number prominently written in black marker on her hand. Domestic abuse has gone hand-in-hand with the global pandemic, violence sitting comfortably alongside more violence. Home, as feminist, queer, and critical race theorists know too well, is not safe for everyone.Footnote ²⁹ Quite the opposite. The global pandemic has also laid bare the ongoing gendered and racialised politics of care. Women make up 70 per cent of the global healthcare workforce and yet policies to manage the pandemic are largely ignoring gender, all the while relying on gendered assumptions of the home, reproductive labour, care and indeed about illness itself. In Chicago, 70 per cent of those who have died of COVID-19 are black. The violent intimacies of structures of oppression right in our faces. COVID-19 is not an ‘equaliser’.

US President Donald Trump absurdly presents himself as something of a present-day ‘superhero’, others should wear a mask – but he can't see himself wearing one. UK Prime Minster Boris Johnson suggested we should all take coronavirus ‘on the chin’, as if it was all going to be some jolly ‘Old Etonian jape’, also, literally, presenting the UK as a nascent superhero, ‘the UK would be the country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion’.Footnote ³⁰ Juvenile masculinised absurdity at its weakest and most dangerous limits. There have been over 20,000 deaths in the UK and counting as we write. And even when Johnson was very sick in an Intensive Care Unit in March, the UK government continued to use absurd masculinist, elitist metaphors: ‘Boris is a fighter – he'll pull through.’ As if all of those who have died of COVID-19 are weak cowards. Disguising, of course, that his pulling through will not be because he is tougher than the rest but rather because he has had every privilege in his cossetted life. Kayla Williams, a 36-year-old Londoner, and mother of three called 111 and 999 with a fever, cough, and severe stomach and chest pains. She was told she was not a ‘priority’ and to ‘take care of herself’. She was found dead the next day by her partner (Saturday 22 March 2020). Kayla was black. The disease is not racist, but its virulent paths expose every day how our world(s) continue to be riddled with racisms.Footnote ³¹

Critical feminist thinking has much to offer to seriously trouble the highly gendered and raced language of war so liberally deployed by global leaders. Donald Trump's unhinged press conferences exemplify the absolute need for feminist scholarship to be at the top of the pile of theorising the pandemic – yet feminism's place is, predictably, easily questioned. Michel Foucault, however, is back on top of the academic theorising pile; the heroic white male intellectual guiding us through imagining resistance in a time of coronavirus.

Feminism, it all its unwieldiness, is interested in what could be – ‘invested in futures we can't quite grasp yet’.Footnote ³² We leave you with Lola Olufemi's words in part as we have no pithy closing concluding words to end with, the present is too violent to pretend at a conclusion. Though these violences are only more visible, not new. But we are in the midst of the ‘impossible’, so perhaps other ‘ungraspable impossibles’ beckon more fiercely now, for which only collective, forceful, and deeply caring energies are called for. What will we/you do now, or indeed in the ‘time after’?