In reflecting upon the divergence of Feminist Political Economy (FPE) and Feminist Security Studies (FSS) one feels puzzled and perhaps even a little embarrassed. How could such a schism occur and be sustained for seemingly so long? This divergence certainly did not appear to characterize the founding of feminist International Relations (IR) when scholars such as Cynthia Enloe (Reference Enloe, Nash and Femández-Kelly1983, Reference Enloe1989) and Ann Tickner (Reference Tickner1992) were attentive to both dimensions and carefully connected issues of gender to the global economy and to understandings of security and militarism. Moreover, to my mind, there is no immediate epistemological or ontological schism between FSS and FPE of the sort that has characterized other feminist divides. The security studies/International Political Economy (IPE) split seems to be more one of empirical focus that does not require a painstaking and perhaps ultimately futile attempt to suture the feminist IR body back together. Indeed, recent and highly illuminating work on the connections between gender violence and global and local political economies (Meger Reference Meger2014; True Reference True2012a) would suggest no reason why we should not simply press ahead with the task of reconnection and driving feminist IR forward to new and insightful places.
Perhaps, however, before we look to restart a new feminist IR with a more overt security studies and IPE dialogue, it may be worth pausing awhile in this moment and space of (dis)connection. I want to suggest that doing so might allow us to self-consciously reflect upon the particular readings of feminist IR that we have invested in and have come to shape the common-sense understanding of our particular IR home and its relationship to the wider IR field. Using this opportunity to stand outside of ourselves could enable both a useful exercise in self-historicization and the possibility to connect with some broader issues and concerns that are currently animating feminist practice and theorizing in IR and the social sciences more broadly.
In suggesting such an approach I am guided by Clare Hemmings and her recent attention to feminist history as a particular story that is told to realize simultaneously a particular feminist past and the contemporary boundaries of feminist approaches and terrains (Hemmings Reference Hemmings2011). Hemmings maintains that what we understand as feminist histories are partial and imbued with particular political motivations that belie feminism's true complexity, which—although seemingly central to feminism—often becomes obscured. She outlines three particular narrative frameworks of feminism—progress, loss, and the possibility of return—that shape our contemporary understandings of its histories and present position. Her concern is not simply to find “correct” stories or to “plug the gaps.” However worthwhile the recovery of obscured perspectives may be, the pursuit of a true story is ultimately futile. Correction has the effect of treasuring what is found and stereotyping what is rejected (Hemmings Reference Hemmings2011, 15). Instead Hemmings advocates an approach that involves asking after “what might be at stake in feminist storytelling” (Hemmings Reference Hemmings2011, 1). In doing so, we become orientated toward a critical scrutiny of our own assumptions and political investments in particular renderings of feminism. As we consider the rejoining of feminist security studies and feminist IPE, starting from this place of self-awareness and attention to the political stances we may occupy in our own storytelling of the progressions, losses, and potential returns within feminist IR could become a central guiding principle.
If we begin via an attunement to multiplicity, it becomes clear that there is certainly a possibility that in our attempt to resurrect a seemingly more holistic feminist IR we could overlook a more splintered history as to how the relationship between issues of war and militarism have intersected with those of political economy. A brief look backward and beyond the academic “institutional arrival” of feminist IR in the late 1980s exposes a plethora of approaches to questions of peace and economy. Some notable post-First World War feminists such as Helen Crawfurd and Vera Brittain made a clear connection between peace and Socialist-inspired politics. For others, questions of economy were much more detached. Catia Confortini's work on the history of the longstanding feminist antimilitarist organization, the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom, demonstrates a complex and evolving relationship to political economy, liberal modernity, and decolonization (Confortini Reference Confortini2011). Even within the 1980s the protests at Greenham Common revealed a feminist divide with certain Socialist feminists voicing criticism of peace work as incompatible with the feminist project (Liddington Reference Liddington1991, 261).
Recognition of these fractures within the story of feminist security studies and feminist IPE does not provide a straightforwardly alternative story imbued with greater validity. It does, however, problematize a certain assumption that inheres in the premise of this IR feminism debate that tends to posit a more complete feminism of the past. This lost feminist IR is present as simultaneously more complex in its attention to both security studies and IPE streams of thought and more coherent in its ability to utilize both perspectives. The somewhat nostalgic premises that underline the notion of a feminist security studies/IPE split has a resonance within recent debates concerning the changing relationship of feminism to capitalism. Captured in the work of Hester Eisensten (Reference Eisenstein2010) and Nancy Fraser (Reference Fraser2009) this argument holds that feminism has lost its crucial connection to class and Socialist politics and has become highly amenable to furthering global capitalism under the guise of women's empowerment. While it seems certain that particular strands of feminist rhetoric have proven useful to the advancement of elite interests of both the state and of capital, the assumption that feminism has both a single manifestation and one that is intrinsically aligned with a particular politics is much less tenable. When we allow for the complexity of feminism and its multiple histories we recognize this as one feminist story among many. Applying a similar distance to scrutinizing the terms of the FSS/FPE divide encourages us to be aware of the implicit agendas that may be present in how we seek an integration of the two IR feminist fields.
It is not only an insight into feminism's multiplicity that has emerged therefore. This more complex storytelling also contextualizes FSS/FPE within more overarching feminist debates. This can also then be pushed further to locate it beyond issues internal to feminism and toward wider trends in social theory and in IR more broadly. Increasingly, social theory is becoming inflected with a renewed and varied interest in materiality. This may be seen in the new materialist turn, the development of scholarship on the body, and affect with and the possibilities and insights of IPE. Within IR we are witnessing the development of a turn to the “everyday” in both security and IPE (see inter alia Hobson and Seabrooke Reference Hobson and Seabrooke2007 and Jarvis and Lister Reference Jarvis and Lister2013). The movements to materiality and the everyday are clearly an important one for feminists to engage with, speaking as they do to key concerns and approaches that feminists have long advocated. Yet it is important to pause to consider the parameters of integration and the ways in which they may be formed by the desire to speak to these wider shifts. As an example, Jacqui True has provided an initial opening for a FSS/FPE reconstruction in her argument that a FPE approach can speak to the omissions within current feminist security studies scholarship on questions of gender-based violence (True Reference True2012b). True suggests that FPE can attend to the more fundamental causes and structures of gender violence that is currently not attended to in feminist security studies. In doing so, she opens up important new possibilities, but also the opportunities to ask about the assumptions and practices of this potentially new feminist IR agenda. Would FPE function as a means to fill a gap? Or does it provide a replacement feminist story? How might this story be motivated (for better or worse) by the wider turn to materiality? How might we consider the ways in which narratives of progress, loss, and return inhere in thinking both as to the FSS/FPE recuperation and within its relation to the IR discipline and beyond?
If we are not seeking a “correct” feminist story from which to understand feminist IR's history and to build its future, then how may this stance be of use in advancing feminist IR? By way of some concluding thoughts I would like to offer some interrelated suggestions as to how a specific attention to the stories of an FSS/FPE merger might help us speak to two particular concerns that animate feminist IR. The first returns us to arguments raised by Eisenstein and Fraser concerning the increasing sense that elite actors are engaged in the co-option of feminism for the advance of their own interests rather than those of substantive gender equality. This theme animates both FPE scholars and FSS. For example, for IPE feminists this is often apparent in discussions around the corporate creation of a neoliberal feminism to justify the further enfolding of women into the market, and for security feminists, the politics of UNSCR 1325 is often presented as a problematic usage of a potentially transformative feminist agenda for more conservative ends. An attunement to feminism as a diverse set of narratives may provide a negotiation of this. If we break with the conviction of a single feminism then we move away from a starting place that feminism can ever be fully and successfully captured. We cannot deny that certain feminists have actively engaged with particular interests that many other feminists would find objectionable. Recognition of this disrupts any sense of the purity of the feminist project that denies its often-fractured realities. As Hemmings (Reference Hemmings2011) outlines, “feminist theorists need to pay attention to the amenability of our own stories, narrative constructs, and grammatical forms to discursive uses of gender and feminism we might otherwise wish to disentangle ourselves from if history is not simply to repeat itself’’ (Hemmings Reference Hemmings2011, 2). Moreover, these moments of co-option never constitute feminism in its entirety. There are always other feminist stories to be inhabited that may provide more resistance potential.
Secondly, this merger may also be turned outward to provide a more robust engagement with our disciplinary home in IR. One of the stories of feminist IR has been a dual process of both disrupting the key institutions and practices of IR through tactics of “gendering” and reifying them through our continued attention to them. Security studies itself is a recent IR construct that feminism has both contributed to the shaping of and has been shaped by in the creation of FSS. Strategies of highlighting narratives may be used effectively to disrupt the certainties of academic IR that continues to progress through the demarcation of boundaries and the delineation of insiders and outsiders.
