ignoring gender in IR gives an incomplete picture of global politics and reifies gender hierarchies that are the root cause of violence

Gender has been talked about as authoritative (e.g. Shepherd 2008) and as changing (e.g. Enloe 2010) in the feminist IR literature. Work using both of those approaches has often focused on uncovering the gender hierarchies that make women invisible in conventionally told histories not only of global politics but of the field of IR (Tickner 2001, 5). This article uses both approaches, arguing that there is a constant presence of gender hierarchy in the international system, and that genders along that hierarchy are sticky but fungible. Like other feminist research on gender, this research serves two purposes: the feminist political purpose of identifying and redressing gender injustice, and the intellectual purpose of knowing as much as we can about what we study. Feminists have argued that, when scholars ignore women or gender in their IR analysis, they are not just reifying gender hierarchy, but giving themselves an incomplete picture of events in and the constitution of global politics. Gender ‘matters’ in global politics in a number of ways, feminists argue, including but not limited to the tendency of the gendering of nationalist and ethnic iden- tities to exacerbate conflict; the links between masculinity, virility, and violence in militarized cultures; the ways that feminization maps onto racial, ethnic, and class conflicts; and the distribution of socioeconomic benefits on the basis of gender (Tickner 2001, 6–7).