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Both critical intellectual property studies and feminist legal scholarship seldom address the gendered dimensions of patent law or its implications for women and women's rights. This lack of attention raises awareness of the need to broaden our approach to studies of patent law and the public domain. During recent fieldwork in South Africa, I began to consider patent law as a feminist site of inquiry and to think through the difficulties of such an examination. tKhomani San women in the northern Cape express concerns over the patenting of biological and genetic materials derived from their indigenous traditional knowledge. Maintaining control over their knowledge and resources is important for feeding their families and safeguarding their intellectual histories and heritage as female plant gatherers. The TKhomani San peoples are currently engaged in political struggles against patent law and the ownership of their indigenous knowledge, but such organizing has not been explicitly gender-based. Although some TKhomani San women articulate patent law as a women's rights issue, other women in the community consider issues of patent law to be gender neutral. Concerns arising from patent ownership of indigenous knowledge are also not the main priority. tKhomani San women committed to gender-based political organizing explain the difficulties of mobilizing and educating indigenous San women in their communities. Political organizing takes money and resources, and San communities are spread out over great distances within South Africa, Botswana, and Namibia, making meetings difficult to arrange. Issues of patent law are also not as significant or pressing as the material conditions of domestic violence, substance abuse, and poverty facing San women and their families right now. Thus, TKhomani San men and women are involved in struggles against patent law, yet their political work does not explicitly address the connections between patent ownership and gendered social relations. Indigenous women elsewhere, however, have begun to address patent law from a gender-based perspective. The 1995 Beijing Declaration of Indigenous Women and 2004 Manukan Declaration of the Indigenous Women's Biodiversity Network explicitly argue that intellectual property rights threaten indigenous women's lives. 1The Indigenous Peoples' Permanent Forum also highlights patent law as an issue of concern for indigenous women. 2 Local women in India have taken up the issue through with the Diverse Women for Diversity Campaign in connection with Vandana Shiva. 3 Patent law as a gender-based issue therefore emerges within some international forums, and may also circulate at the local level such as with Diverse Women. On the other hand, as with the TKhomani San, discourses of indigenous rights around patent law are seemingly framed in gender-neutral terms. Or are they? San struggles related to the patenting of Hoodia may appear gender-neutral as read through the narrow registers of liberal feminism. Yet, as will be further discussed, the masculinized discourses and gendered social relations at work within political struggles related to Hoodia become visible when scrutinized through a lens of transnational, indigenous, African feminisms. Addressing the complex gender relations that shape and are shaped by patent owernship is a complex task. It requires careful consideration of the interactions, relationalities, and hierarchies within social relations of gender, indigeneity, ethnicity, race, and histories of colonialism. Legacies of liberal, western feminism must also be confronted and continually interrogated. Yet, I contend that studies of patent law struggles and complex gendered relations can help push the boundaries of critical intellectual property scholarship and feminist legal scholarship, by asking new questions and defining the fields in new ways. They may also lead to more robust practices of law and science that re-imagine conceptions of ownership and knowledge in ways that benefit less powerful groups. In this Article, I am interested in how one might begin to formulate a feminist analysis of intellectual property law that addresses indigenous women's interests and gendered social relations both discursively and materially. Given the tenuous relationship between indigenous women and feminism, we may not even want to call it a "feminist" analysis. Liberal feminist ideals of autonomy, freedom, and choice often run counter to indigenous feminist politics and organizing that produce valuable critiques of these notions. Furthermore, as will be discussed, strategies against (or even in support of) intellectual property law are radically different among various individuals and groups of indigenous women, and in solidarity with indigenous men. Developing a feminist analysis of patent law therefore is a process that requires careful consideration of these histories. This Article therefore takes a modest first step in formulating a feminist analysis of patent law by scrutinizing conceptions of the public domain that tend to obscure a gendered analysis. The initial move therefore lies in breaking through the current scholarly discourse on patent law in order to make space for a feminist/gender investigation and to consider claiming a public domain of our own.

Women, people of color, and lower-income individuals patent inventions at significantly lower rates than their male, white, and wealthier counterparts. Fewer than 20 percent of all U.S. patents today list a woman as an inventor. Among college graduates, fewer than half as many African Americans and Hispanics hold patents, compared to their white counterparts. Moreover, a child born in the U.S. to a family living below the median income level is ten times less likely to receive a patent in his or her lifetime than a child born to a family in the top one percent of income. These disparities hold back economic growth and U.S. leadership in innovation. Achieving greater gender, race, and income diversity in inventing and patenting would unlock a wealth of innovation, economic growth, and job creation that is now untapped, bringing new inventors, new ideas, and new technologies into the innovation pipeline. The U.S. government, educational institutions, and private industry should adopt measures to promote broad participation in invention and patenting to ensure that women, people of color, and lower-income individuals can contribute equally to the innovation economy. U.S. public policy and private practice should reflect the imperative that broad participation in inventing and patenting drives continued U.S. leadership in the global innovation economy and promotes fundamental fairness. This article concludes with recommendations for policymakers concerning ways to close the gender, race, and income gaps that persist in the innovation ecosystem.

Intellectual Property Rights have been praised and appreciated for their sincere efforts towards the protection of knowledge and original thought. However, for the law to preserve these rights, it is imperative to probe the construction of knowledge which is sought to be protected. This article attempts to view the regime of intellectual property right through a feminist lens and aim to evaluate the patriarchal underpinnings and gendered assumptions. The creation of knowledge and involvement in the cultural production of goods, has been quite dominated by men. Thus, the law which was created (by men themselves) aimed to shield the status quo, with no considerations of feminist epistemology.

This approach warrants us to navigate questions as – Why do ‘only certain’ creations of literature or art deserve protection? Why are traditional categories excluded from the purview of copyright? The answer to these questions lie in an interdisciplinary analysis of the copyright regime, which transcends from a socio-cultural paradigm. The objective of this study is to provoke a multi-stakeholder dialogue in order to prevent the marginalization of work created by women.

political economy of intellectual property that has historically benefited men more than women. Furthermore, the value of a feminist analysis show that it can be 8.    ; intellectual property scholars never, if ever, appeals to feminist interpretations to better understand the law.10 However, while the words copyright and patent do not appear in the feminist literature, the ideas underlying these legal regimes are evident when feminists talk about the production of culture as male dominated, about how women have been excluded from creative work or have had their work appropriated by men, and about a feminist epistemology.11 Thus, by investigating the ways 

feminists theorize about the construction of knowledge, new insights into how ip law has been developed upon gendered assumptions society considers the feminine inferior to the masculine. Sex dualism stops women from participating in “ip law culture,” which is masculine space. Culture is a masculine construction for second wave feminists.17 According to Firestone, the role women play, from a masculine perspective, is at best indirect. Women “contribute” to culture by acting as the “raw fuel for the culture machine” by providing emotional support or inspiration for the cultural creation of men. 

With this healthy scepticism already in play, let us turn now to the focus of this volume: the relationship between the UN SDGs and IP law. As we will see, the prioritization of economic growth, alongside concepts of empowerment, entrepreneurialism, and education briefly critiqued above from a feminist perspective, have come to pervade the IP-gender equality discourse. As part of the international economic order of globalized trade, intellectual property ostensibly has a fairly significant part to play in economic development. Certainly, both the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) frequently tout the need for strong IP protection and enforcement structures to spur innovation-based economic development and foreign direct investment. The WTO’s Agreement of Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) recognizes, in its preamble, the ‘underlying public policy objectives of national systems for the protection of intellectual property, including developmental and technological objectives’.32 This coheres with the common notion in trade circles that IP laws are an essential lever that nations may pull to advance technological innovation and economic development—which, in turn, supports the idea that strong IP rights’ protection is both a sign of, and essential to, a successful industrialized economy. This story has, of course, been the subject of widespread critique in scholarly and advocacy circles throughout the almost three decades since TRIPS came into force.33 The compelling critiques have only grown louder as IP rights have steadily been ‘ratcheted up’34 by TRIPS-plus plurilateral and bilateral agreements, and their costs highlighted, most recently, by the COVID-19 pandemic and the vaccine crisis in which the international IP system was clearly complicit.35 As Margaret Chon has aptly cautioned, ‘[i]ntellectual property, while purporting to heed the issues of development, often runs rough-shod over the central concerns of development.’36 Even if the trade-based paradigm that defines TRIPS and TRIPS-plus trade agreements is at odds with the more multidimensional vision of sustainable development that informs the UN SDGs, it might be thought that WIPO, as a specialized agency of the UN, is perfectly placed to steer the international IP system towards the goals of the 2030 Agenda. As Sara Bannerman has shown, a ‘broad development agenda’ originally dominated the international copyright system under the auspices of WIPO’s institutional predecessor, BIRPI, dating back to the late 19th century.37 However, as Bannerman argues, when WIPO joined the UN system in 1974, the ‘UN discourse of development, when transplanted onto the intellectual property system, was accompanied by a shift to a near-unitary emphasis on economic development’.38 Nonetheless, WIPO has long held itself out as supporting an international development agenda—a claim it was challenged to make good on with the 2007 Development Agenda for WIPO. 39 The original proposal was brought in 2004 by a group of developing countries (The Friends of Development, led by Brazil and Argentina) who accused developed countries of merely ‘paying lip-service’ to the idea of development.40 As Bannerman recounts, this ‘front-on challenge’ arguably regained a more central role for development at WIPO (which, in turn, arguably led developed countries to look elsewhere for opportunities to ratchet up their protections).41 Nevertheless, Bannerman cautions, WIPO shows little sign of embracing any broader sustainable development agenda.42 There is, it should be acknowledged, almost no reference to intellectual property in the SDGs themselves, and no indicators related to IP.43 The SDGs can hardly be considered a direct call to action for WIPO, which receives no mention at all (in contrast to other UN institutions such as the World Health Organization or the International Labour Organization). The extent to which WIPO should embrace the SDGs or broaden its vision of development in response is, no doubt, fraught with the usual tensions between differently situated member states.44 With the practical implications of the SDGs left to WIPO’s limited imagination, however, the vision that has emerged is predictably short-sighted, and disappointingly tethered to the tired narrative that securing and strengthening IP protection accelerates economic growth along the trajectory to development. Thus, the 2019 report on WIPO and the SDGs demonstrates a tunnel vision focus on ‘innovation’: Our growing, interconnected populations need new ways to address the many social, economic and environmental challenges identified by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We need innovation to help us … The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) … exists to enable innovation and creativity … The value embedded in intellectual property rights and supported by the global IP system boosts the inventiveness that drives progress, helping us meet our greatest needs and aspirations.45 In the vision expressed by WIPO Director General, Francis Gurry, at the outset of the Report, WIPO exists to enable innovation, which is driven by an economic imperative, which is fundamental to social transformation, which is what the SDGs aim to achieve.46 WIPO’s website similarly explains that ‘IP is a critical incentive for innovation and creativity, which in turn are key to the success of the SDGs.’47 Conveniently, then, WIPO’s current (and historical) mission aligns naturally and unproblematically with the transformative 2030 Agenda—far from a call to action, WIPO just needs to continue doing what it’s doing: WIPO already ‘contributes to the SDGs by … enabling [its member states] to use the intellectual property (IP) system to drive the innovation, competitiveness and creativity needed to achieve these goals’. Pointing specifically to SDG 9 (building resilient infrastructure, promoting sustainable industrialization, and fostering innovation), WIPO’s 2019 SDG Report assures us that, as ‘history has shown’, intellectual property is ‘an essential and powerful tool’ to support the ‘innovation -transformation-progress cycle’.48 Apparently, we are to assume that innovation, competition, and creativity will necessarily support sustainability, and that the international IP system is therefore a necessary part of the global solution to our present predicament. But again, we might be compelled to ask, how and why would more of the same suddenly bring about transformational change? We have had an international IP system since the 19th century. That system of exclusive rights over innovations, knowledge, and creative expression has steadily expanded in scope and scale, flourishing alongside industrialization, colonial imperialism and neocolonialism, rapid resource extraction and over-exploitation, globalization, neoliberalization, the massive escalation of global income inequality, the climate change crisis, catastrophic environmental degradation, and—importantly for our purposes—patriarchal capitalism and the persistent subordination of women. Even if we can accept that the IP system has a role to play in potentially offering solutions to our current crisis, we can hardly deny that it has also played a role in leading us here, to this crisis point. IP, in other words, has also and always been part of the problem. It is simply not sufficient to assume that IP incentivizes innovation and creativity and therefore promises to support a sustainability agenda. We have to recognize that the IP system is fundamentally one of commoditization and private control—by its nature, it is perfectly congruent with rampant commercial exploitation, unconstrained development, and the growth imperatives of global capitalism. Worse, it is the foundation of what Ugo Pagano calls ‘intellectual monopoly capitalism’, institutionalized by the TRIPS Agreement and characterized by the global monopolization of knowledge, and the resulting dynamics of financialization, inequality, and stagnation.49 Even for proponents of the intellectual property system and its promises, its paradoxes are well known: it limits competition to stimulate invention, and it restricts expression to encourage creativity. It may lend support to a development agenda by incentivizing innovation and encouraging creative production; but even then, it must also hamper would-be innovators by locking up inventions,50 and chill downstream creators by granting exclusive rights over expressive works.51 As Bannerman writes: Although there are broad connections between intellectual property and the SDGs, WIPO narrowly interprets its role in achieving the SDGs primarily in terms of its contributions to SDG 9: “Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure,” and specifically to the goal of fostering innovation. WIPO brands itself as an organization that promotes innovation, not intellectual property, sidestepping the obvious problem that intellectual property can contribute, but can also detract, from achieving many of the SDGs.52 It cannot simply be assumed that, in the struggle for sustainable development, the international IP system helps more than it hinders—that its public benefits will exceed its social costs. The evident failure to seriously engage with the broader challenges and interconnections that the SDGs present to the international IP system, as a central part of our global economic order and the core structure of today’s intellectual monopoly capitalism, is not just a blithe failure of imagination—it is a disheartening reminder that genuinely sustainable development is going to require far more fundamental change than our current institutions and their prevailing ideologies can provide

If the promise of the SDGs lies in their newfound appreciation of the essential connections between equality and sustainability, then WIPO’s myopic focus on innovation and SDG 9 promises little in return. Certainly, it fails to grapple with the role that intellectual property has played in supporting and compounding global inequalities. IP law’s celebrated role in incentivizing innovation and creativity depends on its capacity to establish a system of effective exclusive rights which, by definition, exclude. The IP system necessarily restricts access to new technologies, pharmaceuticals (including life-saving vaccines), research data, processes and outputs, and educational materials—resources that are vital to sustainable development and equality—and it does so by design. Whether the benefits of the incentives that it provides to innovators and creators sufficiently compensate the public for the costs of its exclusions is a matter of perennial debate, of course; but even within the IP system we have, with the incentives–access trade-off that it assumes to be necessary, there are policy levers that could be pulled to lessen the harms of exclusion and accelerate the benefits for sustainability and equality (ranging from compulsory licences and patent pools to mandatory or expanded limits and exceptions).53 More out-of-the-box thinking could explore how IP’s incentives might be adjusted (heightened, reduced, or withheld) to better encourage innovation in clean or green technologies and/or disincentivize the development of environmentally harmful products and processes.54 IP rights in respect of certain subject matters could be accompanied by additional requirements or conditioned on fulfilment of added responsibilities, whether that is knowledge-sharing, tech-transfer, profit-sharing, or obligatory reinvestment in sustainability R&D. As it stands, however, a widespread but misplaced faith in IP’s net benefits seems to be limiting our imagination, foreclosing the possibility that the IP system will be reoriented to become part of a sustainable solution. Rather, it appears to have solidified into an essential part of the status quo—an obstacle, in other words, to transformational change. This much should really be obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is how implicated the IP system might be in supporting or compounding gender inequality, in particular. Intellectual property laws are ostensibly gender neutral, after all, drawing no distinction between men and women when it comes to entitlement or enforcement. It should never come as a surprise, however, that facially neutral laws can produce substantively unequal outcomes, reinforcing gendered power disparities and social inequalities underneath the veil of legal objectivity. Here, too, I argue, there is insufficient appreciation of IP’s complicity in producing and sustaining the very gender inequality that WIPO now seems to think an unaltered IP system can somehow solve.

Copyright and patent regimes evolved from and continue to rely upon patriarchal notions of the individual ‘creative genius’ and the ‘inventor paradigm’ – both whom were envisioned as male. Historically, copyright protection was only addressed to the ‘high arts’ of sculpture, painting, literature and music – fields dominated by men, excluding (until recently) female ‘crafts’ such as needlework, knitting and quilting (Wright Citation1994).

Feminist critics point out that it is women’s labour and their attendance to social reproduction functions which allow men to immerse themselves in the production of knowledge and art, and that individual works of (male) authorship are therefore impossible (Halbert Citation2006). Even today, white male authors are significantly over-represented in copyright registrations in the US (Brauneis and Olia Citation2018). Similarly, feminist scholars have critiqued the ‘inventor paradigm’ of patent law (Gearhart-Serna Citation2009). Women have long been excluded from the inventor role by lack of access to the resources that would allow them to claim patents, and by misogynistic public cultures that devalue women as original, novel authors and inventors. More directly, the inventor paradigm encodes values and epistemologies which are inherently male and Western, and devalues non-conforming knowledge systems (Gearhart-Serna Citation2009). Consider ‘traditional knowledge’, a community based resource, held by and passed down within communities. Traditional knowledge has been associated with indigenous subjecthood and gendered feminine – it is seen as ‘instinctive and pre-modern’ in contrast to the scientific, rational, developed ways of knowing, epistemically associated with masculinity (Gearhart-Serna Citation2009).

The repeated occurrence of these dualistic themes in intellectual property law suggests a broad variety of implications incident to the structure of such dualism. The exploration and critique of mind/body dualism has a long and voluminous history in Western philosophy, and many of the insights generated by this centuries-old debate might be profitably applied to an analysis of intellectual property law. A full discussion of all, or even a few, of these insights lies far beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I shall focus on one particular, relatively recent theme in the mind/body discussion arising out of the feminist critique of dualistic paradigms.

Feminists have explored the tendency of Western philosophy and practice to divide subjects into oppositional categories including not only masculine/feminine, but also mind/body, nature/culture, public/private, active/passive, reason/emotion, subject/object.39 In each of these dichotomous pairings, the former is typically, if sometimes implicitly, regarded as superior and masculinized, and the latter considered inferior and feminized.40 Feminist commentators have suggested that such designations allow the feminized categories to be branded as "other," as conditionally flawed or undesirable.41 The elevation of "mind" and "spirit" over "body" and "matter" have been particularly identified with social predominance of reason and objectivity, which are in turn tied to a masculinized framing of other subordinated categories of gender, race, and class.42 Thus, in his Politics, Aristotle justifies the practice of slavery by arguing that: just as the mind or spirit is superior and should rule the body; just as men as a gender are by nature rational and therefore superior, and should properly rule over women; just as humans are by nature rational and therefore superior to animals, and should rule over them, by the same logic, some classes or races who are more rational should properly rule over other races, who should properly be slaves.4 3

So how can we begin to tell more feminist stories about the nuclear beginning? Below are a few reflections, they are by no means definitive or even fully finished but are simply some paths I see forward for the future of the nuclear past. One step is to reconsider whose story gets told, remembered, and commemorated and to ask Cynthia Enloe’s question of ‘where are the women?’ (1990). While the agonised decision-making of the elite men making the first atomic weapons has been lionised in popular culture, there is limited discussion of the fact that most workers, including a vast majority of the women working on the Manhattan Project doing assembly line tasks, had no ability to make such judgements either about their willingness to partake in such a project or on the impacts of such work on their own health (Schwab 2020). While there is some research on the role of women in the Manhattan Project (Kiernan 2013; Rall 2006; Howes and Herzenberg 1999), more could be done.

Simply adding women’s stories to the nuclear origin myth is, however, not adequate to challenge its socio-political implications and does not necessarily mean one is telling a feminist story. Rather, given that the Manhattan Project was embedded in colonial, racialised structures and practices, a feminist narrative may not just be one that tells the story of women but rather one that has an orientation ‘towards marginalised bodies and sites that start with a feminist politics that take women and gender seriously; however, where this departure point takes any given feminist research and politics are infinite.’ (choi 2021, p. 63 see also Richter-Montpetit 2016). There is great potential for research that studies the marginalised bodies and sites of the Manhattan Project and their gendered socio-political dynamics and contexts. For example, at the Hanford facility in Washington State where the plutonium in the Fat Man bomb dropped over Nagasaki was produced, Du Pont Corporation management paid African American and Mexican Americans less than white workers, setting up a ‘coloured barracks for African Americans and forcing its Mexican American employees to ride a bus 60 miles to the plant to work and segregating the site’, in doing so it ‘introduced racial segregation into eastern Washington’ (Brown 2013, p. 27). This story is just one example of marginalised bodies and spaces in the gendered fantasy of the Manhattan Project that warrants further study.

As argued in this chapter, the power of gender obscures and militates against the potential alliances between diverse women and men and among them across borders to resist war and other forms of violence. In the process, this chapter problematizes dominant constructions of security, examines the strategy of “adding women” to security structures and policies, desta-bilizes assumptions undergirding the gendered divisions of violence, and takes on contempo-rary forces that are expanding the crisis of insecurity. It is critical of “solutions” that put peacemaking and peacebuilding solely on the backs of poorly resourced and marginalized women and vilify only certain men to defl ect attention away from elites (including some women) who promote militarism and war in the name of security. But it also sees some value in what has been called “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1987), which refers to the way groups of people like “women,” who are, in reality, non-homogeneous, have diverse experiences, and have multiple and even conflicting interests, can still make political claims as a group on the basis of what they perceive as their shared perspectives and conditions on the understanding that the commonalities they identify and strategically mobilize to make political demands for change are not timeless or the result of innate traits. As such, strategic essentialism constitutes a political strategy for diverse women to articulate interests in and paths to peace and act together (with supportive men) to bring about disarmed security.

As argued in this chapter, the power of gender obscures and militates against the potential alliances between diverse women and men and among them across borders to resist war and other forms of violence. In the process, this chapter problematizes dominant constructions of security, examines the strategy of “adding women” to security structures and policies, desta-bilizes assumptions undergirding the gendered divisions of violence, and takes on contempo-rary forces that are expanding the crisis of insecurity. It is critical of “solutions” that put peacemaking and peacebuilding solely on the backs of poorly resourced and marginalized women and vilify only certain men to defl ect attention away from elites (including some women) who promote militarism and war in the name of security. But it also sees some value in what has been called “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1987), which refers to the way groups of people like “women,” who are, in reality, non-homogeneous, have diverse experiences, and have multiple and even confl icting interests, can still make political claims as a group on the basis of what they perceive as their shared perspectives and conditions on the understanding that the commonalities they identify and strategically mobilize to make political demands for change are not timeless or the result of innate traits. As such, strategic essentialism constitutes a political strategy for diverse women to articulate interests in and paths to peace and act together (with supportive men) to bring about disarmed security.

The need for strategic silence in feminist citation practices

Considering feminists’ long-standing efforts to challenge the citational silences of the malestream, it is time for us to shift our efforts away from uninterested and often uninteresting scholarship. As Sophia Dingli (2015) has argued, silences can be productive as well as oppressive. As feminist scholars, we might be better served by actively using silence, refusing to engage with work that has chosen not to take gender and other topics at the “margins” seriously. When authors write on topics that have rich bodies of gendered literature but refuse to cite feminist scholarship, it would be appropriate to, in turn, refuse citation. This kind of refusal is more than just petty spitefulness; it could prove to be a political act to begin reshaping the field, to tangibly show our priorities. As feminist scholars are having valuable conversations about the engagement with Global South scholarship, the role of interdisciplinary scholarship, and the enduring sexism of the field, it seems clear to me that we should set our priorities not only with regard to whom we do cite but also to whom we refuse to engage with.

Even before this, however, it is necessary to question pre-existing assumptions of how we can know, along with what we can know. This opens a space for challenging single-site analysis of institutions and structures of power, demanding instead ‘multi-site’ (see Van Milders and Toros, 2020) and multi-agency analysis. It is a process that brings to the fore the multiple voices and contradictions in the way different voices and forms of knowledge are integrated into (Western-centred) disciplinary boundaries (Van Milders and Toros, 2020, p. 120). A feminist pluriverse (Escobar, 2021) is reflexive, co-producing and transdisciplinary.

This discussion will demonstrate, in the ways outlined above, the depth and range of feminist perspectives on power—a prime concern of International Relations and indeed of the whole study of politics. It will illustrate the varied ways in which scholars using these perspectives study power in relation to gender, a nexus largely disregarded in mainstream approaches. From feminist positions, this lacuna marks out mainstream analyses as trapped in a narrow and superficial ontological and epistemological framework. A major part of the problem is the way in which the mainstream takes the appearance of a predominantly male-constructed reality as a given, and thus as the beginning and end of investigation and knowledge-building. Feminism requires an ontological revisionism: a recognition that it is necessary to go behind the appearance and examine how differentiated and gendered power constructs the social relations that form that reality. While it may be empirically accurate to observe that historically and contemporaneously men have dominated the realms of international politics and economics, feminists argue that a full understanding of the nature of those realms must include understanding the intricate patterns of (gendered) inequalities that shape them. Mainstream International Relations, in accepting that because these realms appear to be predominantly man-made, there is no reason to ask how or why that is the case, stop short of taking account of gender. As long as those who adhere to this position continue to accept the sufficiency of the appearances and probe no further, then the ontological and epistemological limitations will continue to be reproduced. Early work in feminist International Relations in the 1980s had to address this problem directly by peeling back the masculinist surface of world politics to reveal its more complex gendered (and racialized) dynamics. Key scholars such as Cynthia Enloe focused on core International Relations issues of war, militarism and security, highlighting the dependence of these concepts on gender structures—e.g. dominant forms of the masculine (warrior) subject as protector/conqueror/exploiter of the feminine/feminized object/other—and thus the fundamental importance of subjecting them to gender analysis. In a series of works, including the early Bananas, beaches and bases: making feminist sense of international politics (1989), Enloe has addressed different aspects of the most overtly masculine realms of international relations, conflict and defence, to reveal their deeper gendered realities.3 This body of work has launched a powerful critique of the taboo that made women and gender most invisible, in theory and practice, where masculinity had its most extreme, defining (and violent) expression. Enloe’s research has provided one of the most comprehensive bodies of evidence for the ontological revisionism required of mainstream International Relations, especially in relation to its core concerns. When Enloe claimed that ‘gender makes the world go round’,4 she was in fact turning the abstract logic of malestream International Relations inside out. This abstract logic saw little need to take theoretical and analytical account of gender as a social force because in practical terms only one gender, the male, appeared to define International Relations. Ann Tickner has recently offered the reminder that this situation persists: ‘During the 1990s, women were admitted to most combat positions in the U.S. military, and the U.S. president appointed the first female secretary of state, but occupations in foreign and military policymaking in most states remain overwhelmingly male, and usually elite male.’5 Nearly a decade earlier, in her groundbreaking work Gender in International Relations: feminist perspectives on achieving global security,6 she had asked the kinds of questions that were foundational to early feminist International Relations: ‘Why is the subject matter of my discipline so distant from women’s lived experiences? Why have women been conspicuous only by their absence in the worlds of diplomacy and military and foreign policy-making?’ Tickner, like Enloe, has interrogated core issues in mainstream International Relations, such as security and peace, providing feminist bases for gendered understanding of issues that have defined it. Her reflection on what has happened since Gender in International Relations was published indicates the prominence of tensions between theory and practice. ‘We may have provided some answers to my questions as to why IR and foreign policymaking remain male-dominated; but breaking down the unequal gender hierarchies that perpetuate these androcentric biases remains a challenge.’7 The persistence of the overriding maleness of international relations in practice is part of the reason for the continued resistance and lack of responsiveness to the analytical relevance feminist International Relations claims. In other words, it is to some extent not surprising that feminist International Relations stands largely outside mainstream International Relations, because the concerns of the former, gender and women, continue to appear to be subsidiary to high politics and diplomacy. One has only to recall the limited attention to gender and women in the recent Afghanistan and Iraq crises to illustrate this point.8 So how have feminists tackled this problem? Necessarily, but problematically, by calling for a deeper level of ontological revisionism. I say problematically because, bearing in mind the limited success of the first kind discussed above, it can be anticipated that this deeper kind is likely to be even more challenging for those in the mainstream camp. The second level of ontological revisionism required relates to critical understanding of why the appearance of international relations as predominantly a sphere of male influence and action continues to seem unproblematic from mainstream perspectives. This entails investigating masculinity itself: the nature of its subject position—including as reflected in the collective realm of politics— and the frameworks and hierarchies that structure its social relations, not only in relation to women but also in relation to men configured as (feminized) ‘others’ because of racial, colonial and other factors, including sexuality. Marysia Zalewski and Jane Parpart directly captured such an approach as ‘the “man” question in international relations’.9 I would like to suggest that for those sceptical about feminist International Relations, Zalewski’s introductory chapter, ‘From the “woman” question to the “man” question in International Relations’, offers an impressively transparent way in to its substantive terrain.10 Reflecting critically on the editors’ learning process in preparing the volume and working with its contributors, both men and women, Zalewski discusses the various modifications through which the title of the work had moved. These included at different stages the terms ‘women’, ‘masculinity’ and ‘feminism’, finally ending with ‘the “man” question’—signalling once again, I suggest, tensions between theory and practice, the difficulty of escaping the concrete dominance of the male subject position in the realm of international relations. The project’s starting point revealed a faith in the modernist commitment to the political importance of bringing women into the position of subjecthood. We implicitly accepted that women’s subjecthood could be exposed and revealed in the study and practice of international relations, hoping that this would also reveal the nature of male dominance and power. Posing the ‘man’ question instead reflects our diminishing belief that the exclusion of women can be remedied by converting them into subjects.11 Adding women appeared to have failed to ‘destabilize’ the field; so perhaps critically addressing its prime subject ‘man’ head-on could help to do so. ‘This leads us to ask questions about the roles of masculinity in the conduct of international relations and to question the accepted naturalness of the abundance of men in the theory and practice of international relations’ (emphasis added).12 The deeper level of ontological revisionism called for by feminist International Relations in this regard is as follows. Not only does it press beyond the appearance of international relations as a predominantly masculine terrain by including women in its analysis, it goes further to question the predominant masculinity itself and the accepted naturalness of its power and influence in collective (most significantly state) and individual forms.

“Some dyadic accounts of war are interested in how states’ interactions lead to (or help prevent) conflict between them in the sense of signaling, rather than in the sense of relating. “Steps-to-war” models lay out “a set of closely related paths to war that involve a series of steps between states that are roughly equal in power.”50 As Levy and Thompson explain, “they show each ‘step’ increases the probability of war, and that the process is cumulative.”51 Relatedly, rivalry theories of war see specific interstate relationships as more likely to lead to war than others. They suggest that because states “focus selectively on the states that appear to represent the greatest threat,” the act of singling out antagonists is key in predicting interstate wars, suggesting that “repetitive war behavior” points to conflict probability.52 In this view, states’ interactions are cumulative in causing conflict and war(s), and some states’ rivalries account for the majority of wars.” “Another theoretical approach to war that takes account of interaction focuses on bargaining. bargaining theories of war are interested in why war(s) happen(s) despite the(ir) cost, and therefore focus on why war-fighting parties were unable (or unwilling) to reach a (cheaper) negotiated settlement to their dispute(s),53 with emphasis on possible pathologies in negotiations, including commitment problems,54 private information (and/or incentives to misrepresent),55 the lack of a “bargaining” space of outcomes that are mutually preferred to war,56 and/or indivisible issues.57 This work implies that it is difficult to reach a negotiated settlement even when such a deal would be optimal for all parties involved.58” “All three of these models assume that states interact with some linear action and reaction, in which “the primary factors in determining war and peace are the foreign policy strategies adopted by states to deal with their disputes.”59 All three models also assume an internal coherence, or unitary nature, of the actors interacting, whereby each is making decisions for an internally united whole. The bargaining models add the assumption that the unitary actors interacting progressively do so rationally and calculate cost–benefit analysis in conflict decision-making. Feminist research has questioned each of these assumptions, arguing that states interact more relationally than reactively; suggesting that states are, rather than unitary, diverse and full of internal conflict that should not be neglected when defining (or critiquing the idea of) “interest”; and that states are not the rational actors that bargaining theorists assume them to be.60” “Action and Reaction

As I mentioned above, a number of dyadic-level theories of the causes of war either do not theorize how states interact explicitly,61 or, in the case of bargaining, rivalry, and steps-to-war models, assume states’ interactions are individuated and progressive. by individuated and progressive, I mean that one state acts, the other (or others) respond, and then the first actor acts again in a sequence of interaction that can be understood chronologically62 and told as a coherent story.

This leads us to the second puzzle: where are the more diverse lineages of contributions to this topic in feminist IR? More specifically, where are the perspectives of women of colour and/or from the global South—not as ‘native informants’ or voices under analysis, but as theorists and researchers of global nuclear politics? Why isn’t the work of Das, for instance, considered an appropriate starting-point for feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics in IR in the same way as that of Cohn? Or what about Teresia Teaiwa’s analysis of how the bikini swimsuit simultaneously sexualizes the generic female body and erases the specificity of the embodied experience of nuclear colonialism by Pacific Island women?13 The fact that such works are so rarely centred in feminist IR leads us to wonder whether developments in feminist approaches to foreign policy, diplomacy and WPS have encouraged a focus on ‘gender’ abstracted from other power relations, and/or the elevation of Eurocentric dialogues on international norms and politics. Further adding to the puzzle is that while postcolonial feminist IR scholarship on war, militarism and security has been growing for some time,14 nuclear politics have not featured much, beyond the work of Das and Teaiwa. Conversely, postcolonial IR scholarship on the ways in which nuclear diplomacy is shaped by colonial legacies and racialized hierarchies is now well established;15 but it leaves uninterrogated the ‘global masculinity game’ that ‘transnationalizes insecurity supposedly to protect the “homeland”’ and ensures ‘brutal expressions of hegemony through technological efficiency’.16 Thus, with a few notable exceptions, feminist and postcolonial IR have tended to talk past each other on the topic of global nuclear politics.17

In response, this article argues that feminist IR scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that take fuller account of the colonial matrix of power, its racialized underpinnings and its contemporary realignments. Coloniality, defined succinctly by Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh as a colonial matrix of power that is constitutive of modernity,18 has not yet become a substantial foundational starting-point for conversations in feminist IR, except as a specialism for some.19 If feminists are fully to understand its implications for global nuclear politics, critical conversations will have to take place across theoretical traditions and disciplines, as well as across geopolitical locations and experiences of different forms of colonialism. This will require the provincializing of western nuclear experiences and discourses, along with the development of location-sensitive, non-totalizing and non-hierarchical understandings of how coloniality has shaped and continues to shape the global nuclear order in gendered and racialized ways. The articles in the special section of this issue of International Affairs are an important step in this direction.

One overarching lesson of American doomsday culture is that the future is indefinite but that hegemonic white masculinity—aggression, self-reliance, stoicism, competitiveness—remains necessary. In Martin’s grave divinations, the recuperation of traditional manly skill sets will rebuild America after inevitable disaster. Like most doomsday preppers, Martin is enraptured by a regression to the state of nature—a fantasy consummated through repetitive scenario planning and preparation for the apocalypse. Here, the world is made to disappear only to be returned to the viewer with an illusory sense of control and mastery over an uncertain future. Doomsday Preppers powerfully illustrates the culture of politics of melancholia at work in the contemporary crisis of masculinity: there was a primal moment to which we will and must return when our survival hinged on the strength and natural ability of men.

Although American television audiences are accustomed to seeing their world eviscerated on screen, outlived by small bands of maleled survivors, the apocalyptic turn in popular culture gives viewers purportedly unmediated access to the masculinized survival rituals performed by ordinary Americans. National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers promises to take viewers “into lives of . . . committed preppers who have devised extensive plans, gone to great lengths, and made huge personal sacrifices to guarantee their very survival.” Each episode’s participants are “ordinary Americans from all walks of life” who are “taking whatever measures necessary to prepare and protect themselves from what they perceive as the fast approaching end of the world as we know it.” Unlike spectacular disaster films, Doomsday Preppers portrays the manly art of survival as a sensible ritual already practiced by millions of Americans. Drawing from the educational ethos of the Nat Geo, Doomsday Preppers invites audiences to emulate “real life” performances of manly survival skills against the background of an uncertain future.

Eric Ip 2010, Doctor of Philosophy candidate, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, (“Globalization and the future of the law of the sovereign state,” 2010, Oxford University Press and New York University School of Law, https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/8/3/636/623517, DOA: 6-25-2018)

The entrenched vision of law as a “uniform and monopolistic” set of rules that governs a given community is currently experiencing a collapse.29 To approach legal phenomena pluralistically—from the multiplicity of “global, international, transnational, regional, inter-communal, municipal, substate and non-state local” perspectives— enhances our understanding of the globalization of international governance.30 A “useful” legal pluralism should recognize the importance of state law but refrain from assuming that everything is inferior to it.31 State law should be neither understood as the supreme system of social ordering nor simply seen as parallel to other legal orders. The relationship between the law of the state and other normative structures is crucial to the understanding of legal phenomena as a whole.32

Much of the anti-state discourse in the radical commons literature is curiously lacking in concrete analysis of the relations between something called the state, civil society and political struggles and movement. When real world cases are invoked they tend to be rather simplistic. The perspective on the Zapatista struggle (e.g. Cunninghame, 2008) sees the Mexican state as a negative totalizing apparatus of domination and enclosure. Yet, things are more complicated. The repeals of the Eijido laws under the Salinas government in the run up to the NAFTA agreement were themselves the creation of the 1917 revolutionary state in response to the original Zapata-led communal movement to re-insert traditional collective rights to land. While the Mexican revolution, like many in the twentieth century, failed to live up to its more anti-capitalist aspirations, the state’s role historically in relation to common rights was certainly more ambiguous than is generally portrayed. Some of the more interesting reflections on these issues have not surprisingly come from other parts of Latin America where the most serious resistance to neoliberalism and global corporate rule has emerged over the past decade and a half. Self-critical reflection on past revolutionary failures has led to a more nuanced sense of how a new “war of position” might be forged through rethinking the relations between a radical civil society and the state (e.g. Escobar, 2010; Harnecker, 2007; Robinson, 2008; Sader, 2011). Rather than writing off engagement with the state, these reflections emphasize the way that new movements fuse older left forces such as trade unions with indigenous groups to contest existing state structures while continuing to organize outside of them. Whether this is with Venezuela’s experiments with “participatory and protagonist democracy” (Escobar, 2010, p. 14) or with Ecuador and Bolivia’s attempts at incorporating new indigenous and nature-based rights into existing constitutions, there is a serious attempt here to challenge hegemonic power structures and shift towards a more radical and democratic alternative. While such projects remain problematic in practice, not least because of the deep-seated power of existing political and economic elites at home and abroad (e.g. Becker, 2011; Radcliffe, 2012), they represent serious attempts to renew relations between state, society and the economy in what Escobar has termed a new “pluri-cultural imaginary” (Escobar, 2010). Rather than fully rejecting the state, they seek to integrate social and political spheres in a more dynamic and imaginative way than previous top-down leftist state projects (Sader, 2011). In contrast, the rejection of the state by autonomous theorists amounts ultimately to a serious failure to address political strategy.

I conclude this article by refusing to offer concrete (strategic or tactical) examples of the kind of mortal—or perhaps even morbid—agency I have in mind. To do so risks turning this agency, in turn, into a perruque. But we need not look far to find contemporary occasions for disaffirmation or revolt, whether implicit or explicit: elegiac or wrathful rejoinders, we might say, to civil death, dispossession, degradation—the condition and the consequence, the means and, for some, the end, of neo-liberal biopolitics, of life itself. De Certeau’s nativist example of Indigenous tactics in the face of Spanish conquistadors ought to be updated in the context of American and Canadian race relations, for instance, and we might begin to reckon with the Black Lives Matter protests that garnered worldwide attention following the slaying of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Dontre Hamilton, Trayvon of Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and so many others, including, more recently, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—and the worldwide protests that erupted mid-pandemic in 2020. In the Canadian context, I have in mind the uncounted child victims of Indian residential schools, the response to missing and murdered Indigenous women, and #IdleNoMore, an Indigenous-led movement that began in November 2012. I am thinking, then, particularly of the kinds of rhetorical agency that must mobilize around such dying and around unmarked graves, not simply as a politics that memorializes and affirms the positive value of life itself, or even of lives in their singularity and materiality (as much as they are both singular and material)—and not simply as resistance, against killing and against injustice—but also in a struggle that hearkens death, holds it and hears it, and refuses the productive terms by which some lives are lived, valued, and exalted, while for others it is their death that is forcibly lived, valued, and exalted.

For within neo-liberal biopolitics, an abstract life itself is the ultimate perruque, the ruse, the disguise, the meme, that obscures the fact that some lives simply— still—do not matter, that some lives will be exposed to death, that some lives will be ritually dispossessed, disappeared, shot, suffocated, and systematically cannibalized. Hierarchies of racialized and gendered difference drive our economies, where difference itself is spatialized by boundaries and inscribed on the bodies of the surplus populations that live and die in obscurity. We might wonder, then, and we might feel grief and rage, as we should, when we bear witness to the city-state’s violent security and paramilitary reprisals, its efforts to “restore” order, which is to say, to spatially displace, segregate, contain, and enclose the uprising thanato/polis and not least to shore up the biopolitical privilege of “threatened” whiteness and white lives. To seek a rhetorical agency in the response to structural violence is more than to politicize death: it is to situate an aesthetics of existence, the making of (a) life, within the resonant, rhythmic, and temporizing horizons of death, and to cut across the spatial stratifications, the paratactical enclosures, of the bio/polis.