The perm forces gender questions to the margins- it asks feminist scholars to compromise too much to meet dominant criteria for "evidence"

(J. Ann, Continuing the Conversation... , International Studies Quarterly 42)

My third point relates to Keohane’s last section on research directions. Keohane uses my suggestion, that investigating states as gendered constructs is not irrelevant to understanding their security-seeking behaviors, to propose a research program similar to that on the democratic peace. My suspicion is that such an endeavor would produce mixed results when given a conventional statistical treatment; we need richer ways of exploring such cultural and social phenomena. As I suggest in the section of my article on feminist perspectives on security, many post-positivist feminists would be unlikely to participate in such conventionally formulated research programs. Their definitions of peace often go beyond the absence of interstate war to include the diminution of both personal and structural violence as well as military conflict. Therefore, the questions they ask and the ways they go about answering them are likely to be different. For example, in her analysis of the Gulf War, Cynthia Enloe (1993:161-200) moves from the personal to the international in her discussion of Filipino maids in prewar Kuwait as crucial players in reducing global tensions generated by the politics of international debt. Looking at the crisis from the perspectives of its least significant participants, her micro analysis of the voices of women from the U.S. and the Gulf offers a “bottom-up” or “inside-out” analysis of the politics of the war; she concludes by arguing that we cannot make sense of this war, or of world order issues more generally, without considering the politics of gender. Inspired by Enloe’s work, Katharine Moon’s (1997) interviews of Korean prostitutes serving American soldiers tell how these women were drawn into the process of foreign policy implementation at the highest level. She notes that a statist definition of national security is irrelevant to these women’s lives and that Korea’s dependent external relationship with the United States abetted its authoritarian control internally at the grass-roots level. Both these studies look for the general in the particular and rely on interpretive strategies and micro analyses to tell us something new and constitutive about war. I am not denying that research on the democratic peace is telling us something important about international relations. But, given their methodological preferences, which exist for reasons I outlined in my article, it is more likely that most IR feminists would choose an Enloe/Moon research strategy rather than the one Keohane proposes. To conclude, Keohane ends his comments with the claim that we will only “understand” each other if IR scholars are open to the important questions that feminists raise, and if feminists are willing to formulate their hypotheses in ways that are testable—with evidence (Keohane, 1998:197). For reasons emphasized both in my article and in this response, it appears that Keohane is asking feminists to do more of the moving on his continua. It is less consequential to broaden one’s research agenda to include new questions—such as the operation of military brothels or the hiring practices of Japanese multinational corporations in the U.S., and treat them in conventional comparative ways—than it is for feminists to give up epistemological positions which they believe are better suited to uncovering oppressive gender hierarchies supporting such practices. Feminists are not averse to good evidence; however, the evidence they bring to IR is frequently seen as irrelevant to its disciplinary concerns. Having offered a choice of methodological positions (Keohane, 1998:195), Keohane concludes by asking feminists to join an American “science” of which Marchand, from her European perspective, seemingly disapproves. Broadening our theoretical, epistemological, and ontological parameters, and respecting difference, which both Keohane and Marchand call for in different ways, is especially difficult. It cannot be achieved without an understanding of, and respect for, knowledge traditions now on the margins, or outside of the social sciences, traditions many feminists believe are more suited to answering the kinds of questions they ask about international politics. (208-9)