Work In Progress
Work in Progress
Books, Textbooks, and Edited Volumes
(Gendered) International Relations, under contract, Oxford University Press.
The textbook opens by providing evidence that gender is a pervasive power structure in global politics, guiding divisions of power, violence, labor, and resources and playing a key role in the preservation of race, class, sexual, and national divisions in global politics. After introducing this theoretical framework, the textbook appears much like a “normal” IR textbook – with chapters on different paradigmatic approaches to the study of global politics. The difference between this text and others on the market (e.g., Goldstein, Baylis and Smith, etc.) is that, as it explains each theoretical approach and provides examples used as evidence to support or rebut each theoretical approach, it also provides a critical feminist analysis of each paradigm. These analyses are accessible and in plain language, relating to the empirical and theoretical interests of IR theorizing traditionally and extending and pushing its boundaries all at once.The distinctiveness of such a textbook is this: this isn’t a book solely for a “gender and IR” class, and “gender” shouldn’t be just a chapter in an IR text that you have to take another course to learn about. Instead, IR is fundamentally different when viewed through feminist lenses, and that argument, while often made, has rarely been explained and supported in textbook form. We tell our students, in monographs and textbooks, that you “cannot think about IR without thinking about gender” – this book means to supply them with the tools to do just that.
Sexual Relations as International Relations
I am currently working on two book projects as a part of a grant project entitled “Sexual Relations as International Relations.” The first is a book on dynastic marriages, sexual relationships, and territory transfers in the establishment and development of the imperial state. With cases from Britain, France, China, India, and Ethiopia, the book, tentatively titled State/Marriage, looking at the making of empire through marriage, the control of vassals through marriage, the control of succession through marriage, the settling of the borders of the state through marriage consummation, and the signification of consummation in the relationship between church and state. Contending that state politics and marriage politics have been always and already intertwined, the project explores an underexplored part of the ways that gender inequity influences the structure and function of government. The second is a book project tentatively titled Sexual Relations as International Relations, which traces the conceptual relationship between borders and sex performances through laws and practices around partner and marriage migration, as well as gender- and sexuality-based asylum, from 1980 to 2020. Combining content analysis and jurisprudential analysis, the book looks at the ways that states use sex acts to distribute (and deny) admittance. It will be bookended by theoretical chapters framing sexual relationships as international politics, and international politics as hierarchically structured in part through sexualities.
(with J. Samuel Barkin) Problematic Premises: The Sciences in International Relations
The argument in this book includes three parts. We begin with the disciplinary context of the book.The translation of theory and methodology from the natural sciences into the international relations literature is rife, and heavily incentivized. Using a political sociology analysis of the field of IR as such, we make a textual-historical argument that there is a set of science fixations in IR that has shaped the dominant narratives of the field throughout its development and continues to hold substantial influence in contemporary disciplinary self-constitution and self-reflection. At the core of Problematic Premises is four chapters which flesh out these arguments with respect to literatures in IR that draw on specific bodies of theory and methodology in the natural sciences. These chapters argue that the ‘hard sciences’ imported into IR are necessarily mismatched in terms of mechanisms of change, metaphorical application, possibilism, and categorizability. The final part of the book addresses the logics and normative commitments of a science-fixated IR. It outlines the professional incentives propping up the ‘science fixation’ alongside the harms that both those incentives and the resulting translations from the hard sciences do. We argue that it is important, intellectually, normatively, and practically, to deconstruct the science fixation in IR to find potential futures of the discipline and of the world it studies. It then takes the singular ‘logic of scientific inference’ that KKV argue applies across political science to task, arguing that the three application errors we point out in the middle section of the book are also evidenced in the assumptions of the utility of that model.
Journal Articles
(with Karia Hartung) “Is There a Feminist Jus Ad Vim?”
What does feminist theory have to say about vim? Is there a feminist jus ad vim? This article engages jus ad vim from a feminist perspective to see. It begins with a brief discussion of the dangers of the term “limited force” in contemporary times. It continues by examining the case for distinguishing the use of “limited force” from warfare, theoretically, empirically, and normatively, finding it weak. The article continues, however, to assume that distinction works, and evaluates existing jus ad vim scholarship from a feminist perspective. It argues that feminist critiques of jus ad bellum also apply to jus ad vim theorizing, and feminisms also critique jus ad vim’s distinctive features. The article concludes by briefly discussing what it might mean to take gender seriously in conversations about the ethics of the use of force (limited or otherwise) in global politics.
(with Emily Gee) “A Woman’s World? Images of Women, Gender and Illicit Arms Trading”
Statistically, women are the most likely victims of the illicit trade in arms in myriad ways. Popular narrativisations reflect their victimization, but to argue that this implicitly leads to female docility or an inherent, gendered opposition to weapons and violence treads on intellectually and normatively dangerous ground. Many women do participate in the illegal arms trade across a wide variety of contexts, at different levels, and in distinct ways: there are accounts of women being involved in gangs, paramilitaries, and terrorist organizations. Nonetheless, popular media narrativisations depict these women as serving mainly in maternal or sexual roles. Building on feminist work on perceptions of women and gender in global politics, this article considers where the women in illegal arms trading are (or might be) and where they are (hyper)invisible. It then examines the hypersexualized, gendered, and racialized dimensions of the portrayals of female arms dealers in media and popular culture. The article further considers the reappropriation of feminized plays on terms, followed by a discussion of the narrativizations of female arms dealers within a gendered analysis of illicit arms trading itself. The article concludes by discussing what can be learned from the investigation of narrativizations of women, gender, and the illegal arms trade in the larger context of gender and security.