Gender, international relations, and humor

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - 3:03 PM Share

Over at Duck of Minerva, Laura Sjoberg takes issue with my post from last week about the effects beautiful women have on men.

Though I appreciate the effort, [Drezner's post] is not funny. Some would call me a spoilsport, and not up for a good joke. That might be also true, but isn't the reason I don't find this funny.

"Mainstream" IR engages gender issues rarely if at all, and when it does, it usually does so fairly trivially. I'm not a regular reader of the Foreign Policy Blog, but back searches say that this is one of the few times issues of gender have been mentioned on the blog... and the only time that I can find in the archive that the IR theorists on the blog have mentioned gender issues at all.

Sjoberg goes on to identify three reasons why this is not funny:

"It trivializes gender-based work in IR."
The post denies "Agency" to women in world politics
By focusing on the beauty angle, I'm "Privileging Sex in IR." at the cost of other gender issues.

She observes:

Women matter, and have agency, in important ways in global politics - as leaders, as soldiers, as peacemakers, as seamstresses, as housewives, as prostitutes, as business executives, etc.; and where women matter (and even where they do not seem to), gender matters in the shaping of expectations associated with jobs and leadership positions, they way people in those positions are treated, and the way that they treat each other. Again, likely unwittingly, Dan's post replicates traditional assumptions that women are at once without agency and to blame for men's mistakes.

I am somewhat hesitant to respond to Sjoberg's points. From my past experiences in the blogosphere, blogging about the politics of gender as a Man ranks right around blogging about Israel/Palestine as a Jew in the category of "Things I Do Not Like Talking About on The Interwebs." These kind of debates have a disturbing tendency to devolve into invocations of Godwin's Law or retorts like, "some of my best friends are women! Really! Why are you laughing at that?"

Still, Sjoberg wants to see more conversation on this topic -- so here goes.

First, I don't think I'm trivializing gender-based work in IR. As Sjoberg herself acknowledges, contained within a humorous post are some seriously interesting hypotheses that are worth testing.

She states that, "this is not the way to encourage/develop the field and those research programs, which are already struggling for resources and legitimacy." I agree that it's not the only way, but you'd be surprised sometimes what can emerge from a humorous post. Take zombies, for example.

Part of the fun of blogging is being able to mix the serious with the light-hearted, the quirky with the conventional posts. In denying the humor of that individual post, Laura (unwittingly, I'm sure) appears to be denying IR bloggers the ability to play with ideas in an admittedly silly, but occasionally productive manner. Laura is also (again, unwittingly, I'm sure) perpetuating an unfortunate stereotype with this observation -- that gender scholars are both humorless and didactic in their discourse.

Last I checked, IR research programs don't rise or fall because of my blog posts, and they certainly aren't obscured by them.

On the denial of agency, a point of concession -- I think Laura is correct. The linked article suggested that men acted stupidly in front of attractive women, but the title of my post appeared to blame women for a social phenomenon that is really the fault of men. True, this was a humorous blog post, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't be as precise as possible in one's blogging. So, point for Laura.

As to whether I'm denying the importance of other gender issues in international relations, I'm going to put the ball back in Sjoberg's court. Don't just complain about the absence of gender issues on IR blogs -- start posting about the actual issues.

Surfing through the Duck's archive of posts about gender, I found little of substance about gender and international relations by Sjoberg. Actually, to be honest, I didn't find a lot of blog posts by Sjoberg at all. Memo to Laura: start blogging more!

There are myriad ways in which gender affects international relations beyond sex and beauty -- click here and here, for examples. And to defend my FP colleagues, some of them have raised the issue of gender. But rather than belaboring the point -- or engaging in meta-conversations about it -- just talk about the issues.

EXPLORE:ACADEMIA, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY, WOMEN'S STUDIES

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JAY GADSDEN

11:48 PM ET

September 15, 2009

Lightbulb

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: THAT'S NOT FUNNY.

THUCYDIDES

1:17 PM ET

September 16, 2009

Bravo

"Laura is also (again, unwittingly, I'm sure) perpetuating an unfortunate stereotype with this observation -- that gender scholars are both humorless and didactic in their discourse."

Exactly. Sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason. Keep on keeping on, Dan.

ERIN

5:22 PM ET

September 16, 2009

The ad hominem fallacy

What does a perspective's purported sense of humor have to do with its theoretical validity? Are you suggesting we can dismiss gender scholars (or realist scholars or liberal institutionalist scholars or constructivist scholars ...) simply because they lack a sense of humor? What a very peculiar standard and surely an unproductive one.

I think the broader point involved here is not whether or not Drezner himself is trivializing gender-based work in IR (and his willingness to engage Sjoberg on the subject certainly suggests otherwise), but rather to highlight the conditions of possibility under which gender studies do tend to be marginalized. What is relevant is that Drezner was able to write a post like he did and classify it as humor, whereas if it had played off ethnic, racial, or perhaps even socioeconomic identity, it would have been much harder to label as "humorous."

I agree that humor and silliness do have a productive function in research and thought (a classmate and I recently did a research project on pirates which lent itself to all sorts of analytically interesting jokes), but I think Drezner's original post failed to use its humor to deliver a productive or relevant point. And at that point, I believe Sjoberg is right that he has done nothing for her (or any) research program. The zombie post comparison here is flawed insofar as "zombie" is generally accepted as a fictional identity. Nobody is threatened -- and nobody's research program risks being delegitimated on something other than its merits -- when we crack jokes about zombies provoking a Kantian world state. The crucial difference is that the zombie post treated zombies with a sense of humor, but it was premised on the idea that they were legitimate actors in world politics. The women in world politics post was not.

This is not to say that "real world" identities should be treated as sacred cows (that WOULD be unproductive) but merely that it matters that identity matters to people. And the broader implications of this are two-fold: First, it suggests that sensitivity and respect would lead to more productive, non-Godwinian discourse. Second, it suggests that gender (and other identity) scholars may have something interesting and relevant to contribute to the field.

And finally, while I am certainly not conceding that all gender scholars are humorless, when the first reaction to their critiques and analysis tends to highlight something that has nothing to do with the merits of their research program and everything to do with their scholarly identity, it's not hard to see how they might lose their sense of humor pretty damn fast.

THUCYDIDES

6:10 PM ET

September 16, 2009

The problem...

Erin,

The problem is that you presume that the "merits of [one's] research program" can be neatly disentangled from one's "scholarly identity." Most scholars have difficulty keeping these things separate, and I would say that I have observed that conflation in feminist scholars even moreso than others. Sorry. It's just my observation.

Moreover, when I have criticized feminist approaches to IR in public in the past, I've been told that I "just don't get it," implicitly I presume because I am a man with a successful career in the business. Now, in those cases, whose first reaction is based on "scholarly identity" rather than the merits of their "research program?"

ERIN

12:24 AM ET

September 17, 2009

An identity-based stereotype for an identity-based stereotype...

(... will make the whole world kind of pissed off and less well-informed than it might otherwise be.)

In those cases, the feminists in question would be just as guilty of an ad hominem fallacy as you were in your original comment. The tendency to dismiss an argument on the basis of who is making it certainly cuts both ways. But -- and at risk of sounding quite patronizing -- while it's unfortunate that your criticisms were dismissed on the basis of your identity, that doesn't make it acceptable for you to turn around and do the same thing. If anything, it should teach you not to do so, since it's clearly a poor strategy for intellectual engagement, which (one hopes) ought to be both parties' goal.

"You just don't get it" is, by itself, a woefully inadequate response to critiques of feminism. It's unconstructive and, as your example illustrates, it's alienating. Indeed, it undermines the very understanding and respect it suggests must underpin a productive engagement of feminist theory. However, because feminism is premised on a different ontology and epistemology than mainstream IR theory, examining the reasons behind this knee-jerk reaction can indeed contribute something to the debate. This is the point that J. Ann Tickner makes in her article "You Just Don't Understand: Troubled Engagements between Feminists and IR
Theorists" (http://www.psci.unt.edu/enterline/Youjustdontunderstand.pdf). Rather than finger-pointing and blaming, Tickner examines why there is misunderstanding and miscommunication between feminist and mainstream scholars (that this tension exists is empirically borne out by Sjoberg and Drezner's conversation as well as the comment sections of both scholar's comment sections!). She's not saying men or policy-makers or businesspeople do not understand feminist theory; she IS saying that scholars approaching IR from positivist epistemologies and state-based ontologies are likely to struggle with feminism's different approach.

And, to the extent that these questions have quite a bit to do with one's scholarly identity, I would agree that identity and research are far from inseparable. But critiquing feminism on the basis of its post-positivist epistemology is a far cry from dismissing it because its advocates lack a sense of humor. The former leads to an important debate about how we understand the international system and how we can evaluate the quality of research -- this is a productive debate and one central to IR (as shown by the subsequent exchanges between Tickner and Keohane in International Studies Quarterly). The latter devolves into vacuous stereotypical attacks -- on both sides.

THUCYDIDES

12:22 PM ET

September 17, 2009

I've tried

Sorry, Erin, but I've tried. I understand the post-positivist ontology of feminist approaches quite well. I've read the literature. I've taken it seriously. I just don't find it compelling, yet I'm told that I "just don't get it." I "get it" perfectly well, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it and when I don't agree with it that doesn't make me a big, bad, evil MAN. In short, you've drawn an equivalence here between me and the feminists with which I've engaged, and I flatly reject it.

TGGP

6:16 PM ET

September 16, 2009

My guess is that bloggers who

My guess is that bloggers who write about gender politics are disproportionately female and ones who write about Israel/Palestine are disproportionately Jewish. Gender/race/ethnicity/class are less salient for groups that set the tone for the majority. The majority of people also don't spend much time on foreign policy and probably could not point to Israel/Palestine on an unlabeled map of the world.