we don’t cede the political –theorize gender as a structural category

Perhaps because of these problems, feminist IR scholars rarely use the word ‘structure’ and even more rarely discuss the relationship between gender and structure in global politics explicitly. While that reaction is understandable, I argue that failing to engage ‘third image’ theorizing directly assumes either that there is no ‘structure’ in Waltzian terms in global politics, or that gender is irrelevant to understanding that structure. This article, with a majority of scholarship in IR, finds the question of international system structure worth exploring. Borrowing from feminist literatures in sociology and women’s studies, it argues that gender can be seen as structural. As such, it contends that feminist ‘third image’ theorizing is not only called for but imperative, as there is a structure to the international system and that structure cannot be understood without gender analysis. One cannot, however, engage in feminist ‘third image’ theorizing without having a sense of which third image theorizing to engage first.5 This article starts with Kenneth Waltz’s understandings of structure, in part because Waltz’s work serves as the foundation of much of IR’s history of structural theorizing but also because ‘structural realism is a far richer sociological theory of international politics than its critics and defenders usually recognize’ (Goddard and Nexon 2005, 10). In Waltz’s conception of structure, ‘action is a social and relational category’ where interaction is ‘the product of discrete and irreducible systems,’ which can be seen working in the interaction of component parts (Goddard and Nexon 2005, 15, 16). Such an approach emphasizes the material and authoritative aspects of international system structure over the social or cultural elements.6 This approach may be ‘hard case’ for gender analysis in global politics (which many consider to be exclusively social), but could also serve as foundational for feminist engagements with the structuralist literature in IR from its foundations to its present manifestations. This article, then, takes a feminist ‘third image’ approach to theorizing critiquing and building off of Waltz’s notions of structure. This article begins by briefly reviewing Waltz’s analysis of the meaning and function of structure in causing war, as well as objections raised by critics of structure realist approaches. It then introduces gender analysis in IR with a focus on its theorizing of war(s). The third section, with reference to the work in feminist sociology on gendered organizations and cultures, sketches an approach to theorizing international system structure through gendered lenses. It is followed by a section that makes an initial plausibility case for the argu- ment that the international system structure is gender-hierarchical, focusing on its influence on unit (state) function, the distribution of capabilities among units, and the political processes, which consistently govern unit interaction. A fifth section outlines the implications of an account of the international system as gender-hierarchical for theorizing the causes of war generally and wars specifically, while a sixth section focuses on some places where the Waltzian account of international structure and my own feminist account might predict different outcomes in the making and fighting of wars. The article concludes with some ideas about the potential significance of a theorizing gender from a structural perspective and of theorizing structure through gendered lenses.