IR and realist theory is inherently gendered and denies potential for change –alt is the best starting point for global politics

If we accept that gender is the social meaning attached to the shape of our bodies, we can begin to understand why it is that feminist IR scholars insist that gender is not something we add to the study of world politics, but rather is integral to its functioning. That is, you cannot ignore (or abstract) the ways that gender informs and affects the practices of world politics. Gender is, on this view, not only a noun (i.e., an identity) and a verb (i.e., a way to look at the world, as in the phrase ‘gendering global politics’) but also a logic, which is produced by and productive of the ways in which we understand and perform global politics. This chapter wants to explore further the issue of gender and the body, and to suggest that the relationship between sex and gender is not as straightforward as it is commonly represented. [T]he genital area accounts for only 1 percent of the surface area of the body. But – 1 percent or not – genitals carry an enormous amount of cultural weight in the meanings that are attached to them, and I would argue that they constitute nearly 100 percent of what we, as both cultural members and as producers of cultural knowledge, come to understand and assume about the body’s sex and gender. (Valentine and Wilchins 1997: 215) We in the Anglophone world conventionally share an ontological assumption of the duality of gender: humans (and most other living things, for that matter) come in either ‘M’ or ‘F’. This is best described as a commitment, most often unconscious, to dimorphism: the assumption that human beings can be easily and unprob- lematically divided into two (di) distinct categories based on their physical forms (morphism). This essential separation informs the ways in which we think about the body and also the ways in which we think about a host of social and political events and relationships that we conceive of as being ‘to do’ with the body – for example, marriage ceremonies, parenting, sports, even eating. Because the separation occurs at a subconscious level, we are not even aware most of the time that our preconceptions about bodies are influencing how and what we eat, what sports we think we should or shouldn’t learn at school and who other people should and shouldn’t sleep with. The crucial insight of this book is that these assumptions about bodies are intrinsically, inherently related to the study and practices of global politics, because global politics is studied and practised by gendered bodies. It is very comforting to think of the body as something that we cannot change,3 something that does not affect our social or political lives, or even not to think of it at all. Conventional contemporary theories of International Relations do not speak much of bodies because the individual does not matter – only collectives of individuals known as ‘nations’ feature, and only then insofar as they are assumed congruent with the state (hence ‘nation-state’). Admittedly, in classical realist theory, representations of state behaviours draw heavily on ideas relating to ‘human nature’ (Morgenthau 1952: 963). Classical realism claims as its antecedents theorists of ‘human nature’ such as Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, and appeals to logics of ‘human nature’ to explain self-interest and rationality as ‘evidenced’ by the unitary state. However, the ‘human nature’ under discussion is, on closer inspection, the nature of ‘man’ (see Morgenthau 1973: 15–16). ‘Men’ feature, then, but only inasmuch as they are abstract universalised individuals; men as bodies do not enter into discussion. This is largely due to the conventional understanding of the body as natural rather than social or political. However, as Chris Weedon explains, ‘[t]he appeal to the “natural” is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking, but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future’ (1997: 3, emphasis in original). Formulating a politics of the body, or a perspective on global politics that takes the body seriously, requires that we think carefully about how the body manifests in our understandings of international relations. ‘Formerly, the body was dominantly conceptualized as a fixed, unitary, primarily physiological reality. Today, more and more scholars have come to regard the body as a historical, plural, culturally mediated form’ (Bordo 2003: 288). This claim is a useful starting point for thinking about the body in global politics: how and in what ways is the body mediated? How have our understandings of ‘appropriate’ bodies changed over time? How do variously located practices of global politics mediate and situate bodies differently? As Michel Foucault argues, ‘the body is . . . directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (1977: 26). If this is the case, then we need to understand the ceremonies and signs, and acknowledge that our understanding is affected by the bodies that carry and are carried by them. This is not a politics of aesthetics, that is, how the body looks in specific circumstances. In this volume we do investigate how bodies are represented, but also interrogate the political practices through which bodies come to matter at all in global politics.